The Penrose Fallacy:
1. We don't understand Quantum Mechanics
2. We don't understand the mind
3. Therefore QM explains the mind
Or as Steve Harnad once said, he takes all the embarrassments and failings of one field and marries them with another.
1. We don't understand Quantum Mechanics
2. We don't understand the mind
3. Therefore QM explains the mind
Or as Steve Harnad once said, he takes all the embarrassments and failings of one field and marries them with another.
I am not the only one who has this interpretation of him. I certainly arrived upon it independently but so did many (more credible) giants in the field.
As far as I can tell, he doesn't have an argument that consciousness stems from QM beyond the rather elusive nature of both.
So if you think that is wrong, by all means, explain the connection you think he elucidates.
In an attempt to avert that spiral of world-suck, let me attempt to instead meet your request head-on. Penrose is not saying what you say he's saying, and would not be able to fill up two books with your argument.
Let's talk hacker for a second. What you're saying is that Penrose is basically saying "well I don't understand this bug in my computer program, and I don't understand the kernel in my computer, so therefore a kernel bug is causing this bug in my computer program." You are going to be predisposed to see any reduction of a bug towards the kernel as being evidence that yes, your characterization of the argument is correct and the argument is indeed laughable. This is understandable if someone just told you that hypothesis off-the-cuff, which I surmise is how you've probably encountered Penrose. (That is, I take the fact that you're laughing as evidence that you've not read both The Emperor's New Mind and Shadows of the Mind.) The alternative however, is that someone has (a) a high-level statement of "this shouldn't be happening", and (b) knows that the only way that such things can happen, barring things like the MMU misbehaving, is a kernel bug, and (c) has been attempting to trace down the code to the fundamental syscalls, and found that the thing-that-shouldn't-be-happening is indeed bracketed around one syscall in particular which does not seem to be doing what the docs say it should do. And if a hacker has attempted all of this, I mean, they might still be wrong: but their argument is no longer something of the form "I don't understand the kernel and I don't understand this bug, therefore the kernel caused this bug." It is something more sophisticated than that, and you're doing a disservice by laughing at them.
One and a half of Penrose's books are ultimately about why the computationalist/algorithmist thesis of brain function seems deeply incomplete -- that a hallmark of some certain examples of reasoning appears to be deeply nonalgorithmic. (For example The Emperor's New Mind supplements his usual Godel argument with arguments that if brain plasticity comes from local neural plasticity then it is unlikely to have a great generality, but by a clever analogy if it does have a great generality then not only does that mesh with an idea of global plasticity, but it is very unlikely to be algorithmic. The one and a half books are basically full of little digs that, seen together, do seriously undermine faith in the thesis.) This is essentially the "bug" above. His favorite example is that we are capable of proving to our own mathematical understanding that our mathematical-understanding-algorithm contains true sentences which we will never be able to prove; if this algorithm exists then it is able to prove something that it will never be able to prove, which seems like a straightforward contradiction. But there are one and a half pop-sci books that he's written building up some other problems with this thesis in a way that even if you don't start off with knowledge of the relevant physics/comp-sci/whatever, you can hopefully understand it enough to appreciate the problem.
He follows these up with a principled dive into what's actually underlying these "bugs". That is, he discards ideas about souls and takes it seriously that our reasoning is realized in our brain, and takes seriously that this is a biochemical system, and evaluates whether the noncomputable phenomena that he is "debugging" can come from chaos or randomness or the like. He is able to rule most of these out with auxiliary considerations, and so tries to get one level closer to the hardware: the biochemsitry is well-modeled, we know, by physical chemistry; there are likely no new fundamental interactions or whatever to be found in biochemistry.
Looking into the physical chemistry level he finds that it can be somewhat cleanly divided into two parts: quantum and classical. Technically, it's all quantum: but you can handle a lot more with various classical rules of thumb, and this has basically all been done before him so he can just steal those results:the classical part of physical chemistry and probably even the vast majority of the quantum part of physical chemistry are algorithmic, it is known that quantum computers don't do other things than what computers do; they just might do many things more quickly. There exists only one part of the quantum part of physical chemistry which is not.
Unfortunately, he doesn't have access to the source code, nor docs for what nature does--so he actually constructs physical-chemistry models that could hypothetically do the sort of buggy things that he's seeing at the top-level that he has carefully ruled out at the other levels of explanation.
And this is all to say: as you can hopefully now see, these books contain a lot more than simply "we don't understand X, we don't understand Y, therefore Y causes X." Namely there is an actual understanding for example that X is realized in a system which has to be modeled with Y, and which has some features that can only come from certain corresponding features in Y, which we actually do understand very well. There has been a solid amount of good effort to push down that causal chain until one is left at these syscalls and then saying "something is fishy about those." And his argument might indeed be wrong, there are many little parts where maybe he's wrong about how chaos works and how it could cause a similar bug, just as our programmer above might be wrong about whether two processes are properly synchronized via locks or whatever -- but it's no longer this laughable thing of "ha, he doesn't understand X and Y so he thinks Y causes X!" that you're trying to say.
The language of bugs also serves to mask what the issue is. It is true that Penrose (as best I can remember) spends time talking about the limits of algorithms. I don't remember the "neural plasticity" stuff, but I do remember he was much impressed by our ability to understand Godel's theorem.
Let's just pause here.
Does that make sense to you? That our ability to understand the incompleteness theorem is somehow evidence against the algorithmic nature of the mind? Or do you think it shows we have a poor grasp of what it means to "understand" something, and of how symbolic reasoning and proof interacts with our mind?
I understood neither his, nor your summary of his, explanation of how QM is supposed to plug this hole in our understanding.
In fact, your little discussion of QM has, if anything, bolstered my point.
Note: we know that biological laws rely on physical laws, and that QM (and, say, relativity) are our best theories so far. That is not in dispute.
But please explain how QM plugs in this Godel hole. When the crux of the matter comes, there seems to be general hand waving (on his part).
It does make sense that our ability to understand the incompleteness theorem is very close to self-contradictory -- I don't know that I'd say it is, without a doubt, self-contradictory; I have not dove deep into how provability logics might force □(a → (p ∧ ¬□p)) into a contradiction, and what you need for that (possibly with reasonable axioms it merely derives ¬□a which just means that if there is an algorithm for understanding then we'll never uncover it?).
QM does not by itself plug the hole in our understanding; Penrose has never said that to my knowledge. However a tiny part of quantum physics is the only known part of physics that's capable of producing nonalgorithmic results (the vast majority of QM is linear algebra in funny hats), hence if we've got a nonalgorithmic result it makes sense to follow our "best theories so far" towards that tiny part of quantum physics.
My HN profile has carried my thoughts on Penrose and Hammeroff's theories for some time now. Good to see it posted here and debated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reducti...
Anecdotally, I find the people drawn to his view are largely physicists. And the people who scorn him are largely "cognitive scientists". (I am closer to the second group than the former).
What you find to be "reasonable mechanisms", I find to be completely unreasonable. No, I don't think entanglement is a "reasonable mechanism" for "the fact that a bunch of disconnected neurons produce one mind."
I don't even know why one would think that quantum entanglement is even vaguely relevant to the "problem", and I think it has something to do with a misunderstanding of the problem.
Do you think that there is a problem of mind in the form of "a bunch of disconnected neurons produce one mind"?
There is definitely a "binding" problem. Beyond the question of why the state of many disconnected neurons (or to go one level down, molecules) are subjectively experienced as a single consciousness, you also have the issue of why other neurons nearby are not subjectively experienced. After all, your consciousness doesn't even extend to your entire brain.
Why do you find it unreasonable that entanglement would be involved with integrating signals from disparate regions or several neurons?
The problem is how we integrate the signals from many regions in to whatever is generating the single perception (or perhaps several parallel perceptions -- I don't know that there aren't other experiences coincident with mine, just that I have access to one of them).
Unless you're postulating that a single neuron at a time is responsible for my subjective experience, then you do need to explain how several neurons are generating a single signal.
My experience with cognitive scientists is that they simply punt on the problem, completely failing to address how the signal is amalgamated in to a single stream of experience even as they talk about what regions contribute features of it.
Let me put it this way, suppose there was a mechanism, call it X, that explains to your satisfaction how many different neurons can "integrate the signals from many regions".
Does that explain to you why physical neurons create a subjective experience? Would you now consider the "problem of consciousness" to be solved?
Leaving "consciousness" aside, there is no issue at all of course. We have a straightforward computational theory of how different neurons can integrate their output and produce a computation.
The problem is that this idea of "integrating" signals is not clearly laid out. If it is not the computational problem, then what sort of problem is it?
Koch and Crick have also proposed "a mechanism" for something like the co-ordination of various neurons to explain visual awareness. A frequency at which all the neurons "cohere." (Koch is also a real genius, by the way. https://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/ps/access/SCBCFD.pdf )
Again, the problem with their proposal is that it is not really a "mechanism." Suppose all the neurons that recognize a face happen to be vibrating at 40 hz, Does that "explain" "consiousness?"
I lean towards the philosophers. Read one good critique by Fodor, and you realize that the questions are poorly formed.
This would give us a science of experience and allow us to categorize and create new experiential beings. That's a goal that many of us have.
Now, for various reasons, we might suppose a medium we're already aware of (or mediums in some combination -- as is the position of the materialist). Then the question becomes entirely about the integration mechanism, as that's the only piece of the puzzle we don't know.
So if you're a materialist, the integration of brain patterns in to a signal which corresponds to subjective experience is the question of creating new 'souls' (in the sense of beings who experience), and also of categorizing what exactly has a 'soul' (in the sense of inner experience).
The problem is how the computational structure which produces our behavior couples to our experience of it, which is a consistent, evolving perturbation in something, even if just in the sense of being a quasiparticle formed of the constituent parts interacting. (Though, likely, we're missing parts of the computational story -- I don't think most serious scientists would argue that.)
I think you just don't like the question, but it's pretty clearly formed, at least as far as big research directions ever are.
"It proposes a way by which those neurons can create subjective experience, yes"
I just don't see it.
Suppose you somehow show me that various neurons contain particles that are entangled. Let's say I believe you.
So now how do they create subjective experience?
I see blue because my neurons are entangled? I see a flower because my neurons are entangled?
What is "the medium that they are creating"? How are you even using these words.
If I knew that my neurons have entangled particles, I would know no more about consciousness than I do now.
What I actually said, and you misunderstood: "the medium they're creating the signal in". Your paraphrase is so far from that, I have trouble even addressing the confusion. It's particularly egregious that you omitted key words when you're clearly using them to make passive aggressive comments about my understanding.
The answer to how this addresses the question is that the medium is experiential -- anything that creates effects in it is 'experiencing'. Experiencing seeing blue corresponds to a particular pattern of activity in the medium. (Though, there is no default 'experience of seeing blue' -- it's possible that we experience different ones, different animals have different ones, etc. This relates back to the computational structure.)
How entanglement is involved is that there's a single 'unified' experience when we know that different portions are generated in different brain regions, but don't (obviously) converge the information to a point (eg, it's always spread at least in a cluster of neurons), which suggests that we're talking about something non-localized in the medium, ie, not a point object.
The source of a lot of non-locality is through entanglement, so it's reasonable to conjecture that it's involved here, as well -- though, of course, it could be a different mechanism.
If the pieces of your brain which are generating the perturbation in the experiential medium(s) are entangled, it could provide a model of how it's carrying a non-localized piece of information -- your experience.
But if your theory is that consciousness arises as a result of particular patterns in a medium, couldn't that medium equally well be "the universe"? Why do you see it as necessary for the medium to be entangled? Why couldn't consciousness just be the result of patterns in non-localised particles?
Entanglement is a mechanism by which a single, non-localized value can be carried by pieces (none of which themselves carry that value).
And hence the materialist proposal here is precisely what you propose: that the universe is fundamentally experiential (or at least parts of it that brains interact with), and the single, non-localized experience is created and carried via entanglement of the constituent "particles", which are themselves impacted by the regional computation of the brain (eg, by knotting with the "main" knot carrying the experience, in analogy to a TQC), thus allowing the disparate regions to contribute to a single experience with characteristics picked up by regional contributions.
Proposing that it's not entanglement means proposing a new phyical process by which that information can contribute to a single, non-local value, which people researching the brain haven't even taken a stab at.
Which is why I find their proposal that it's not entanglement to be strange -- they seem to blithely ignore the physics/informatiom theory implications of that.
But you're already proposing something so fundamentally different to anything that exists, namely consciousness arising from patterns. There is no reasonable reference point to make any assumptions about such a thing.
>they seem to blithely ignore the physics/informatiom theory implications of that.
We can't make physical information assumptions about something which as far as we know may not even be physical. There is no obvious space-time location that consciousness exists at such that it needs to gather information to that point.
I've never seen a brain researcher claiming to have seen any non-locality. It would be the kind of thing everybody would be talking about. Mostly, people seem happy to accept many speed-of-light delays on something that is centimeters wide and counts time in dozens of milliseconds.
You want a way to keep coherence overall through the brain, but there's no reason to think that coherence is needed.
I agree that the computing is done with moving charges and chemical propagation (at substantially below the speed of light), but that doesn't account for how the information gets integrated in to a single signal for experience. But we also see that kind of structure in, eg, the proposal to build a TQC, where you build a computation in to non-local structures built out of entangled particles by moving around charges at substantially lower than the speed of light.
If it's not being amalgamated in to a point object (which doesn't seem to be the case -- there's no 'you' point in the brain), then it must be being amalgamated to a non-local object.
I am happy to rephrase my question as what is "the medium they're creating the signal in?"
You are clearly getting annoyed at this, and I don't see us making much progress. I find this "experiential medium" even more confusing, and I don't see the connection between entanglement and "unified" experience.
But, hopefully others will make up their own minds based on our words.
"Is Penrose making the case for free will? “Not quite, though at this stage, it looks like it,” he said. “It does look like these choices would be random. But free will, is that random?”
Like I said before, we just don't have the concepts to model free will right now, so we should not dismiss it as impossible.
Imagine trying to explain to someone living 1000 years ago things like quantum entanglement and superposition. Or Gödel's theorem and the Halting problem. These concepts challenge our intuitive senses, and yet we have to grapple with them because they are supported by real evidence.
Now imagine a thousand years from now, new phenomena or understandings will generate concepts that can model free will that is both non-random and non-deterministic.
This abstractly makes sense, but I think the free will supporters still have the burden of proof of, right now, explaining at least at a very high level what free will would be if not random/deterministic. Otherwise we must lend credibility to all kinds of crazy theories.
So far nobody has been able to do that.
I think free will is the ability to make conscious choices. These choices are guided by a chaotic, but ultimately deterministic preference function, which itself can be modified by conscious choice. You could argue that the deterministic preference function is a negation of free will, but I think the separation in the causal chain between condition and response is significant. There are lots of cases where there is no experience of choice mediating the transition from condition to response, so I think that feeling is indicative of something meaningful.
Term 'free will' seems to be thought terminating cliche. It seems poetic and deeply meaningful but descriptions as yours say it's just 'deterministic action interrupted with coin flips'. From the subjective point of view it does not matter if action is deterministic or arbitrary coin flip. There is no 'freedom' in free will.