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Any explanation by Roger Penrose is bound to be good
by canadiantim 9d ago
Any explanation by Roger Penrose is bound to be good
- thrance 9d agoExcept when he's rambling about quantum consciousness or other nonsense, which happens a lot nowadays.
- randomImmigrant 9d agoYou know, I pooh poohed his theories. Still do in sum. But there’s a there there that’s building. Damn Deepak Chopra and his ilk of idiots for making any conversation of quantum mechanics and biology tinged with pseudoscience. Hopefully we’ll keep getting experimental evidence as we go that it’s not at all absurd to consider quantum effects in biology. That said, those effects are going to look nothing like sustained coherence for long periods of time.
- MarkusQ 9d agoThey didn't start the fire. Quantum + biology → Woo has been with us since the 1960s at least.
- yreg 9d agoHave you actually hear him talk about it? It is very far from rambling and he will be the first to tell you that he is not sure he is right. We need physicists to come up with and develop novel ideas to consider no matter how many of them might be entirely wrong.
- GoblinSlayer 9d agoIf mind was random, people would miscalculate 1+1 with 50% probability. So earth might be flat, but it's unlikely.
- yreg 9d ago> If mind was random, people would miscalculate 1+1 with 50% probability. That does not follow at all.
- GoblinSlayer 9d agoMiscalculation doesn't follow from randomness?
- yreg 9d agoIf you run an LLM (with temp >0) and use a true random generator for seeds, it will still tell you 1+1 is 2.
- GoblinSlayer 9d agoYou mean mind is deterministic and cancels all noise? Then what quantum physics would do there?
- yreg 9d agoYou don't need to cancel all the noise to solve 1+1 correctly. The model in the example is non-deterministic. I don't know Penrose's view deeply enough to defend it further (view which I for the record do not share).
- GoblinSlayer 8d agoHe's just rambling.
- j16sdiz 9d agoWhere did the 50% came from?! Many phenomenon emerge from randomness with very high probability just because the law of large number.
- 8d ago
- thrance 9d agoThere's a difference between making and testing hypotheses, and desperately scrambling to find proof to justify a conclusion made in advance in the face of mounting evidence that said conclusion is false, which is what Penrose is doing regarding quantum consciousness. Grossly simplifying: he is a dualist, he wants to reconcile his belief in the soul and his physicist's materialist view of biology, so he resorts to putting the source of consciousness in quantum phenomenas, and seeks to prove that they occur in the brain. I disagree that there's an immaterial soul, I disagree that it puppets the material universe through quantum phenomenas, and I disagree that there are important quantum phenomenas in the brain. Most physicists are with me on these.
- qsera 9d ago>source of consciousness in quantum phenomenas, and seeks to prove that they occur in the brain I think he should look for consciousness as the source of quantum phenomena. Not the other way around. But as he is a physicist, all nails looks like a physics problem. It is the same situation where people might have struggled to explain the heavenly observation using an earth centric model. Once you invert the wrong premise that you consider as fundamental, the answer, previously so elusive, becomes trivial...
- yreg 9d agoI'm with you regarding opinion on consciousness, but do you think it would be 'better' if there were no dualists and no dualist essays and ideas? Because I hardly think so. This is not like alternative medicine where there is harm for people who don't follow the mainstream. And I stress again that Penrose (in the interviews I saw) doesn't actually claim that he absolutely has to be right.
- thrance 9d ago> do you think it would be 'better' if there were no dualists and no dualist essays and ideas? No of course not, people should be free to discuss and believe in dualism. What I find regrettable, is how often Penrose's name is invoked in an appeal to authority, as if his past (and very valuable) contributions to physics were enough to make him right on everything, including this subject. Ultimately, I believe dualism is wrong, and I believe I have good reasons to think so. My previous comment was simply my attempt at deconstructing Penrose's argument, participating in the ever-ongoing popular debate.
- qsera 9d ago>quantum consciousness or other nonsense Can you tell me why it is non-sense? We, through our senses perceive a world. This world we try to understand using physics. But these perceptions itself stands on top of consciousness. So consciousness is at least, as real as the world that physics conventionally tries to reason about. It could be even more fundamental, because you can have only consciousness in this universe, but still could sense a whole universe with "things" inside it. But without consciousness, and just a universe with "things", there is no "sensing"... Point is, physics should include study of consciousness...
- deleted 8d ago[deleted]