Roger Penrose Says Physics Is Wrong, From String Theory to Quantum Mechanics

Interesting. How do we know that there is a top, and who is sitting on it?

I tried answering this question with the google search: "greatest 20th century mathematician". The top link was this (http://fabpedigree.com/james/mathmen.htm). Hilbert and Grothendieck were the highest 20th century mathematicians. (Mentions that Grothendieck is "widely considered the greatest mathematician of the 20th century".) von Neumann was a bit lower, #15.

But I personally don't understand the whole ranking thing. :) Math is in bad shape if you can order people this way. I know that in software, there are a few parts which deeply interest me; while I couldn't care less if the other parts happen to have some fancy virtuosos. (They're about as interesting to me as virtuosos of building houses out of toothpicks. Which no doubt requires great ingenuity, but it's not my interest.)

So if someone were to present me a list of top programmers... it's probably the case it's dominated by these toothpick-virtuoso analogues. And even if it magically weren't, the concept is weird, because the people active in my fields of interest all have their different, interesting perspectives. They're not clones of each other which differ only in a single rankable quality. It's more about actual ideas, rather than the managerial perspective which focuses on the human as carrying units of production.

(BTW, I can't tell how much Eliezer's joking in that quote, even though I've read his fiction. One can form code virtually "as easily as thoughts", but that's like forming verse as easily as thoughts. The question is, do you find their verse interesting?)

Maybe, but still their atoms are always on the move...

(3) My first problem is that most definitions for qualia I come across are back doors for dualism. The second problem is that I'm not sure there's any point to discussing purely subjective phenomena, since a discussion by its nature requires objective description.

(4) I don't have an inner theater, or if I do, I don't call it that. I have no idea what you are talking about. I don't know how this relates to a supposed indivisibility of consciousness (I mean... how are we supposed to know it's indivisible, since we lack the technology to cut a brain up and split it between bodies, not to mention the ethical issues? Am I supposed to trust you that it's indivisible? And what about the evidence from split-brain patients?)

If anything, I perceive a very disjointed self. For example, I feel like I have a distinctly single-threaded audio processor which can run independently of other functions. I can play the piano and talk, but not at the same time, and when I'm doing other things quietly I get free background music in my head without using an iPod. (I wouldn't call it inner theater.)

One reason we can't understand brains the way we understand cars is because the human brain is more complex by many orders of magnitude. So saying our "consciousness itself does not seem to be divisible in that way" is not very convincing. Microprocessors also don't seem to be divisible that way, but I've been assured that they are. And another important difference is the processes that designed cars, microprocessors, and brains. Part of the design criteria for cars and microprocessors is that they be easy to understand from understanding their parts. The car is designed to be understood.

A better comparison might be circuits designed using powerful optimization algorithms. A number of researchers have designed circuits using general purpose algorithms (such as genetic algorithms or swarm algorithms). For all but the most basic end goals, the circuits are practically incomprehensible. One researcher designed an analogue circuit to compute the cube of an input voltage, the resulting circuit defies understanding even though its components are clearly simple transistors. Another researcher made a signal analysis circuit using an FPGA, the resulting mess was a technological marvel but not something you could understand by sitting down and looking at the schematic. Given that the human brain is probably at least ten orders of magnitude more complicated, and created using an equally powerful optimization algorithm, there's no need to bring in quantum mechanics to explain why we don't understand the brain.

I think the major problem here is that too many people I meet have a narrow view of what it means to "understand" something. We're used to understanding (a) simple things, like thrown rocks and (b) complicated things for which there exists significant neural machinery to analyze, such as used car salesmen. As the things we try to understand become more and more complicated, the way we understand them becomes more and more like the Chinese room.

(5) Never said there was one electron. I said that the two electrons were interchangeable. I'm saying if you actually could clone someone to the extent necessary for Star Trek teleportation but forgot to dematerialize the original, then the label of "clone" and "original" is arbitrary. To me, it seems a cop out to assume that everyone agrees that one is the clone and one is the original.

Could you clarify what you mean by "confirmed by experiment" and "key part of the universe's workings"? The problem here is that the subject of the sentence is "it", so I'd like to know exactly what is confirmed by which experiment, please.

I'd also like to hear how consciousness just "falls out" of quantum mechanics, since my current understanding of Newtonian mechanics is sufficient to me. My theory is that I am a machine whose output is composed of deterministic parts and thermal noise, and I have yet to encounter experiences not explained by this theory.

As for string theory, its acceptance is hardly universal.

> in part due to younger age and rigorous selection criteria

How could you distinguish between those two effects in order to be confident that younger age is a significant contributing factor?

(3) To solve your first problem, remember that a definition is independent of its rhetorical purpose: that is, it tells you what we're talking about, but it does not force or "backdoor" any sort of metaphysics upon you. To solve your second problem, realize that you're committing a fallacy of equivocation: you're assuming that because something is ontologically subjective -- that is, it only makes sense in the context of a subject which experiences it -- that it is epistemically subjective -- that is, it can only be known, talked about, and reasoned about, by that subject who experiences it.

(4) Just look at the words you chose: "I perceive a very disjointed self." You chose the singular 'I' and the singular 'a self'. As a subject, you would like to be just one subject -- you would like all of the parallel efforts of your different neurons to identify one "me". But then suddenly you're astonished that all of your experiences must be described as unifying into a single whole, which can't simply be treated as separate senses, but come to you as part of one whole conscious experience. That in turn astonishes me.

If you believe Sperry's ideas on his split-brain patients, then yes, there is evidence that to divide the brain creates two conscious processes, simply by cutting off communication between parts of the brain. I guess you could add that to the list above, although it's not unique to quantum processes -- but if consciousness were caused by something quantum, then you would indeed expect that two systems which could no longer entangle could no longer form the same consciousness. But this is also true for certain classical systems, like computer networks, and might just as easily be described as a network effect -- which is why I didn't include it.

Re your discussion that cars are a bad example: I agree; I used them because (1) they were your example and (2) I never proposed that we "need to bring in quantum mechanics to explain why we don't understand the brain." Again, the question I was answering was, "why are some researchers so quick to blame our failure to understand consciousness on quantum mechanics when we don't yet understand the classical parts of the brain?" -- which presumes an agreement that yes, the brain is indeed something whose classical parts we don't yet understand. The question was "why might some people reasonably think that quantum mechanics will form an essential part of the theory?"

(5) It doesn't matter what people agree or disagree. What is pivotal about the Star Trek transporter case, what I am trying to articulate, is that it creates all sorts of difficult problems about identity. In particular, quantum consciousness theories, while often functionalist and materialist, see an opposition from much of what passes presently for materialist functionalism. This particular brand of materialist functionalism has certain philosophical problems, because they conceptualize consciousness as some sort of logical pattern or arrangement. So, for example, if a computer simulated a brain, even though we would say that there is no "brain" per se, presumably these people would say that there is nonetheless consciousness.

Now, the problems are diverse, and since I mentioned above the ontological/epistemic subjectivity distinction of Searle, I would like to raise that in the same articles Searle also mentions an observer-relative vs. observer-independent distinction: whether something is a computation depends on how you look at it, he points out -- but whether you are conscious should not depend on how I look at you.

That's not the Star Trek problem. The Star Trek problem comes instead, for me, from a book called Reasons and Persons by Derek Parfit -- it's relegated to part three of the book, but otherwise it's a good read, and you can skip to the chapter if you want without missing anything. There are an abundance of things which you might think "make you you," or more generally, make you the same person as you were five minutes ago, or even five years ago. But thinking about the Star Trek transporter, and one's visceral reactions to certain stories about imperfect transporters, tends to make many of these philosophically problematic. The problem is that even though there are two people who are qualitatively identical in the world, they are not "the same person" in the above sense. So the fact that you are "the same person" as someone five minutes ago would appear to not depend on any particular quality or aggregate of qualities. Qualities wouldn't make you who you are.

You've added, as I see it, that since the universe is quantum, even physical continuity can be made epistemically ill-defined if the replicas are sufficiently exact, but I don't think materialists would have a real problem with that.

But here's where a quantum approach could have a benefit: in a quantum theory of consciousness, qualities perhaps could make you who you are. The whole thought experiment crumbles if the device is not even in principle realizable, and that's precisely what quantum mechanics purports to offer.

(5b) The "it" is quantum mechanics.

(5c) First off that's not what I claimed -- I claimed that "some of the building-blocks of warm-and-fuzzy consciousness just fall out." Second, you're in luck: if Newtonian mechanics is sufficient to you, then Ehrenfest's theorem makes consciousness fall out of quantum mechanics, problem solved. Unfortunately, your "theory" requires modification because the "thermal noise" is quantum and the "deterministic parts" are not deterministic at bottom, but other than that, I invite you to use whatever your theory is, and apply your Hamiltonian with the Schrodinger equation rather than with Hamilton's equations of motion. On average, you'll get consciousness out again. QM does not take away; it adds.