[sarchertech]

He’s been writing on consciousness for 40 years now and he’s been studying the topic since undergrad. Also most of what he talks about is soundly within his field.

The only thing that’s really not is the microtuble thing and he collaborated with someone else on that.

That’s also the least interesting thing he says I think because he admits it’s just an interesting place to look for quantum effects and he has no idea if he’s right.

[jibal]

Nothing that Penrose has talked about in re consciousness is "soundly within his field" other than "the microtubule thing" and his collaborator, anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff, is a crank among cranks.

Also, Penrose has not been "studying the topic since undergrad" ... he's been bothered by the notion that he is "just a computer" since then, but he didn't get into seriously addressing it until much later, and he's never studied it--he notoriously ignores the entirety of the literature of philosophy of mind and neuroscience.

> That’s also the least interesting thing he says I think because he admits it’s just an interesting place to look for quantum effects and he has no idea if he’s right.

This is simply not accurate.

And the fact is that Penrose is completely irrelevant to the subject of consciousness other than via an argument from invalid authority.

P.S. The response is disingenuous and discrediting ... I won't respond to that person again, especially after seeing this comment: "I’m in the Penrose camp that Turing machines can’t be conscious which is required for true AGI" --- this is pure ideology. TMs are clearly adequate for AGI even if somehow "TMs can't be conscious" ... c.f. Chalmers' philosophical zombies.

[jibal]

>Clearly TMs can be conscious

It's a lie to claim that I said or even implied this.

OTOH, the "camp that Turing machines can't be conscious" is pure ideology and is based on repeatedly proven logic errors--Lucas was known to be wrong about Godel before Penrose came along and embraced his errors. And it's very common for people in that camp to project their own unsubstantiated baseless faith "that Turing machines can't be conscious" (which for Penrose, like many others in the camp, was a consequence of a semi-religious metaphysical notion that he wasn't "just a computer") onto rational informed people, with rhetoric like "people in that have unwavering faith in the idea that consciousness arises from computable processes" -- it's the logically default position, a consequence of intelligence and knowledge, not faith. The hilarious thing is that "consciousness arises from quantum effects" doesn't get the no-TM faithers what they want--they're still "just" machines, even if the machines use qubits rather than bits.

[sarchertech]

Man you’re replying all over the place, I’m having a hard time keeping up. You’re also spending a lot of time on arguing with someone who has been discredited over a theory that has been discredited.

Penrose and Lucas’ argument may or may not be correct, but that still doesn’t imply that consciousness can arise from computable processes. There is no reason that it should. There is absolutely nothing to suggest this should be the default position.

The only way to get to this position is through faith. Doesn’t mean you’re wrong. But it’s not a falsifiable position since you can’t prove consciousness.

[Retric]

There’s nothing to suggest it shouldn’t.

Keeping consciousness undefined means the requirements to form it are also undefined. There’s no way kizzip can arise from computers, there’s no way kizzip can arise from anything other than computers.

[sarchertech]

If you agree that nothing implies that it should and nothing implies that it shouldn’t. Picking one side or the other and declaring that should be the default is an unsupported statement of belief.

It is perfectly fine for you to adopt that belief. My issue is in declaring that belief to be self-evident support for calling someone a crank.

[jibal]

Indeed there is nothing to suggest that it shouldn't and in fact everything suggests that it should. There's a reason that Penrose goes to such lengths to try--erroneously--to prove that Godel's theorems are beyond the grasp of computers ... which is bizarre since they are theorems of arithmetic and as such can be mechanically derived. The default position is that consciousness, whatever it is, is a physical process of the brain, and the default position is that the processes of the human brain are subject to the Church-Turing thesis. People who say otherwise frankly have no idea what they are talking about. And when they proclaim that they are in "the camp that says that TMs cannot produce consciousness" then it's intellectually dishonest to an extreme to deny that they are acting on faith, and to later pretend that they have an open mind and that it's the people who actually have an education in this arena who have a faith-based position.

[manic_monday]

The default position only matters if we have no proof of any position.

[sarchertech]

None of this is accurate.

P.S. this response was merely a condensed version of he response to my reply. Here’s a longer one.

>Nothing that Penrose has talked about in re consciousness is "soundly within his field"

Quantum gravity, physics, and mathematical logic are clearly within his field. He’s a physicist, mathematician, and logician

>Also, Penrose has not been "studying the topic since undergrad" ..

He says that he has.

>he notoriously ignores the entirety of the literature of philosophy of mind and neuroscience.

Disagreement with some members of a field isn’t the same as ignoring it.

>This is simply not accurate.

It is. I heard it from the horses mouth.

>And the fact is that Penrose is completely irrelevant to the subject of consciousness other than via an argument from invalid authority.

It’s a field that has never produced anything concrete or beneficial to anyone outside the field. I’m unsure what relevance even means there.

>P.S. The response is disingenuous and discrediting ... I won't respond to that person again,

Yet you did. I saw your edit.

>Clearly TMs can be conscious

I guess that’s that then.

[Retric]

> He’s a physicist, mathematician, and logician

You just placed biology and neuroscience firmly outside of his wheelhouse. Just the size of the structures involved, temperature, timescales, and distance between neurons alone is a serious problem with his theory here.

If he is approaching things from a purely hypothetical standpoint it’s an unlikely but reasonable idea, but it utterly fails as part of how a larger system we actually understand quite a bit about works. Which is always the hard part of science, you’re not just fitting a single curve but thousands of different datasets.

[sarchertech]

>You just placed biology and neuroscience firmly outside of his wheelhouse.

For biology he had a collaborator. You aren’t likely to find many biologist / quantum physicists.

The term neuroscience wasn’t even coined until after he finished his PhD. You could probably name many other relevant sub specialties that doesn’t have formal training in.

If any of his theories are correct, you wouldn’t expect a neuroscientist, or biologist to be equipped to come up with them.

>If he is approaching things from a purely hypothetical standpoint it’s an unlikely but reasonable idea

He is. His first book essentially had no proposed mechanism. Then an anesthesiologist and researcher read it and contacted him with the proposal that microtubules might provide an environment that is insulated from the normal warm, wet, and noisy environment of the brain.

His next book investigated that idea, but he’s repeatedly said that this is just an interesting place to investigate and he has no idea whether it’s true.

>but it utterly fails as part of how a larger system we actually understand quite a bit about works.

How does it fail? I’ve read quite a hit about it and plenty for people are skeptical but I’ve never seen anyone showing how it “utterly fails”.

[Retric]

> The term neuroscience wasn’t even coined

The first car wasn’t called a car by the people who built it, but we back date terms. He’s not a neuroscientist because he’s not studied the brain’s physical structures.

> insulated from the normal warm, wet, and noisy environment of the brain

? The tube is made of atoms at the same temperature as what’s outside the tube, there’s no isolation here.

> How does it fail?

It fails in many many ways. Individual neurons are vastly too small for consensus to occur on that scale you need something involving millions of them at body temperature at the very low end. Local quantum effects are obviously going on but they don’t scale.

[sarchertech]

The first car wasn’t built by an “automotive engineer” either. But by someone from another discipline who decided they were interested in applying the knowledge from other disciplines to the this new one.

Penrose has certainly studied the brains physical structures. He has 40 years of books and papers published on the subject.

>same temperature

No one is proposing that they are literally thermally insulating.

> on that scale you need something involving millions of them at body temperature at the very low end. Local quantum effects are obviously going on but they don’t scale.

That sounds like a good problem for a Nobel Prize winning physicist to investigate. If a neuroscientist were investigating it, I’d expect them to bring in a physicist.