Roger Penrose: “Consciousness must be beyond computable physics” | Hacker News Reader

Roger Penrose: “Consciousness must be beyond computable physics”

newscientist.com

My money is on the other end of the spectrum - Any sufficiently large chunk of linear algebra and activation functions is indistinguishable from consciousness. ;)

That's so bleak.

Why?

What exactly did Penrose say. Seems to me the New Ageists over at New Scientist are about promoting quantum wooism in the vein of Deepak Chopra.

Trust can be tough when really smart people can get things so wrong

Care to elaborate?

I would say only smart people can get things so wrong. Experts are those who can dig the deepest, even if it's in the wrong direction, like psychologists before neurosciences, astronomers before telescopes, etc. To get the wrongest ideas, you need to ask an expert.

Posted yesterday

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33607695

But it is computable because we compute it...

How are we computing something we can't yet even define?

This has to be the silliest thing he has promoted, unless he is saying that (e.g.) quantum physics will not end up being computable. Consciousness as implemented relies on cellular processes, some of which necessarily involve quantum phenomena. It is funny to single out consciousness from among myriad other sorts of biological activity and behavior.

It's very silly, and seems like a sad effort to shoehorn dualism back into science. But if the human brain is quantum-magical, kindly point out empirically how its mechanisms are special versus that of any other mammal's brain, or any reptile's, or any nematode worm's.

Quantum mechanics is only involved as much as it is for any other form of chemistry. There is no ghost in any kind of meat.

To be fair, quantum magic could have evolved after the human lineage forked off from the root that includes other mammals.

IE, some magic gene duplication shortly after humans and neaderthals split from their common ancestor, then one copy evolved a slightly different structure that allowed neurons to exploit quantum magic.

This seems implausible, nor would I place the root around the human lineage; might as well assume that all animals, or really anything with a neuron, is capable of this.

Otherwise, we'd be able to isolate the factor (a gene that produces a protein).

Yes, this is what is silly.

That is not to say it's impossible that we, uniquely, possess the consciousness gene. Possession by demons is technically possible, too, and equally silly.

It's also silly because if it's a gene, then it's just using conventional chemistry to produce an effect. Plants have genes to make chloroplasts that use quantum effects[0] to efficiently do photosynthesis, but nobody is arguing the mechanism is some sort of special woo-woo science. And you can use the same tricks in a machine[1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthesis#Efficiency

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_photosynthesis

Uh, yeah, when photosynthesis was first shown to exploit quantum it was called special woo-woo science. But it just exploits coherence, which is the one thing that seemed within reach of enzymes.

Dualism, yes, but silly -- maybe not. Yes, it's obvious that brains are made up of their chemistry, but this is not (just) about the human brain or even necessarily any brain. We haven't been able to draw a line for consciousness in the spectrum of complexity of life forms.

Did you even read the article?

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