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Comment by mongol | Hacker News Reader

Has anyone read his writings on consciousness? When I was young and still believed in free will I imagined that consciousness used quantum mechanics as a way to generate free will. I later learned that Penrose had theories that sounded similar. But have not read about it.

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Here is an interesting discussion of this work by physicists: https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2756

I've read both. The first was the most impactful to me personally. The way he uses Gödels theorems to argue against the computability of consciousness is actually quite ingenious and it's presented in such a straightforward way that I could easily grasp it from first principles. I also find the criticisms I've seen against it to be knee-jerkish and flimsy.

Orch OR seems like a shot in the dark, and while certainly an interesting thought experiment I'd like to see more evidence before I buy in to it.

There have been many responses to the Gödelean argument that miss the point, but I have been persuaded that it is vulnerable on the basis of its assumption that a logical system must be sound if it is to be a candidate for capturing a human's reasoning powers. Minsky, among others, pointed out that our ability to believe falsehoods, and to hold contradictory beliefs, opens the possibility, if not the expectation, that human reasoning is not sound.

IIRC be wrote about that in The Emperor's New Mind a formative book for me (even though I was still at highschool when I read it) but one I haven't really returned to now I've a more academic understanding of the subject matter. To-do!

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