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Comment by ricksunny | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting we have such receptivity in the HN community here on physicist-proposed metaphysics (yay!), yet in an entirely similar light - an article covering physicist Roger Penrose's 'microtubules' on HN a couple days ago, we get the reflexive "but experts say this is bunk' treatment.

Personally I don't know from Sam on either hypothesis. I'm just wondering for all things seeming equal, when do we get receptivity from the HN community and when to anticipate the knives coming out? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41696559

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It can be pure chance. Who commented first, who happened to click the article, the time of day it was posted, the style of the website the article was hosted on, etc etc. it’s easy to get sucked into the illusion that the commenting population is a stationary distribution when in fact it might be highly multimodal and each thread is not a representative sample of the overall population.

Having said that, your question still stands, I suppose I’m just thinking it ought to be phrased differently? why does one article trigger more engagement than others, and why does one article trigger more engagement with certain subsets of the HN population? (Whereas your phrasing could seem to suggest there are monolithic grand narratives that describe what “The HN community thinks”)

>chance Yes I suppose I should find some serenity in the pure chance of things.

>monolithic

Yes it would be unfair of me to interrogate as if the comment-base was a monolithic whole. So perhaps not monolithic, but still probably manifesting more shared responses to stimuli than the wider population at large. I definitely feel there's a distinct HN 'meta-personality', as I believe another replier re. organelles was alluding to. While forum moderation probably also shapes that to a degree, the meta-personality feels more the result of shared professional technical training (and knowing that others in the community are of like training, very very broadly speaking).

I'm guessing you're referring to my HN comment here (and the resulting discussion): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41696559

Well... not all hypotheses are equal! I'm not necessarily a fan of Wheeler's "participatory universe" either, but I would note a few important differences:

- Orch-Or claims to explain the origins of consciousness and free will. This overlaps with philosophy, which is concerned with what it means to explain consciousness. And philosophers generally have responded with serious criticisms.

- Orch-Or relies on specific biological assumptions e.g. about the robustness of quantum coherence in brain matter. In fact it is not merely metaphysical but is in principle falsifiable, which is a good thing! However, physicists and neuroscientists have found a lot of these assumptions to be unreliable.

- Orch-Or appears to be based on a misunderstanding of Godel's Theorem and computationalism, as has been pointed out by mathematicians and computer scientists.

- The Participatory Universe is effectively an interpretation of quantum theory. It just guides us in understanding the ontological statuses of the object in the theory. In this it is similar to Everettian (many worlds) type hypotheses. Orch-or goes much further and I would regard it as a modification of quantum theory. In this it is similar to objective collapse type hypoetheses.

> Orch-Or appears to be based on a misunderstanding of Godel's Theorem and computationalism, as has been pointed out by mathematicians and computer scientists.

When I was looking for this, I failed to find or agree with anything conclusive for either side. Admittedly, I am not knowledge enough to be a good judge. Do you have any pointers?

The SEP page on Godel Incompleteness has a section 6.3 on "arguments against mechanism": https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/goedel-incompleteness/

There is also the "Criticism" section of the Wikipedia page on the Penrose-Lucas argument: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose%E2%80%93Lucas_argume...

Those and the citations therein look like a good starting point.

I think I am more likely to accept Wheeler’s path compared to Penrose’s because, although I think they may have both made category errors, Wheeler seems to have known that consciousness wasn’t the actual thing, and he wanted to work out what the actual thing was.

I think Penrose is almost in the same bucket as the panpsychic philosophers: assuming that consciousness is the important thing and trying to construct a universe in which it is emergent in certain complex things in a more concentrated way.

Personally I don’t think we even have a definition of what consciousness is and we are using it as a place holder for some property of observation that we haven’t quite nailed yet.

The real question - which I do not intend to answer - is, "Are the same HN users who are receptive to the metaphysics here also providing the 'experts disagree' retorts?" If we were to categorize the different mindsets of HN users and study their reactions, we might be able to treat the whole as an organism and the different groups as organelles. Then we poke it with sticks for science!

Or even bodies without organs… uh oh, shhh, no Deleuze allowed on here I think!

I certainly like the organism / organelles metaphor, referencing it (in response to an adjacent comment about whether the community could be treated as a monolith or not). 'meta-ganism'?

As the other comments point out... most things are dynamical systems that respond to chaos theory (small inputs, big divergence in output). Many of the possible states can be reduced down to two or so poles (e.g. skepticism vs acceptance vs outrage vs indifference in our potential responses)

Trying to determine when or why a dynamical system like this goes to a specific state is Sisyphean if I put a word to it.

Novelty and memes play a part as well. If skepticism propagates faster around an idea (say Penrose's proposal) you'll get uncritical thinkers parroting. Same thing happens for the acceptance of ideas that often have no basis in reality.

This is probably one of the better descriptions of forum interaction (mid-size and up - ie past the point where you recognize some meaningful percentage of handles in any given thread)/social media that I have ever read. Much better said than my sibling comment!

It does seem like there are often strange attractors (loosely speaking), steady-states, collapse states etc that the heterogenous commenting population display organically.

I also really like that description of forum interaction. Sisyphean it might be to get to the bottom of it all, but isn't this the sort of thing marketers spend a pretty penny to attempt to accomplish? One could prepare a battery of A|B tests around articles covering a ceratin concept, change things like time of post, quality of formatting), maybe space them out over the course of a year to avoid repetitious exposure, and see which pole the comment base gravitates to.

I’ve noticed in round table discussions where everyone is expected to comment, an idea will emerge early and then dominate future responses.

Sure, many of us seek acceptance from the group, but also, as an idea gets traction, I think it just gets harder to have an original idea.

It’s like trying to remember how a song goes while another one is playing, and I see it on HN threads (like this one!) often.

Group-thinkers gonna group.

I would appreciate a HN filter that would systematically remove the first thread.

This Quanta Magazine article is mostly non-bunk history and uncontroversial physics; it lets us bask in the warm glow of confirming what we thought we knew, while filling in a conformant few facts we didn't know around the edges.

And when it tackles the possibly-bunk issues, it makes no concrete claims; it presents them in an anthropological manner. There is nothing to rebut.

Penroses theories about cognition smell like bunk and I only got a physics undergraduate degree. I’m glad he has found things to do in his old age but there are not a lot of physics departments jumping to put those theories to the test.

This isn’t a “both sides” issue, it’s two separate physicists and two separate theories about different areas of physics.

> it’s two separate physicists and two separate theories about different areas of physics.

They're both touching on consciousness. Wheeler's participatory universe (least several paras of the article) & Penrose's (& coauthor's) microtubules.

Penrose was (just days ago) on Theory of Everything talking about whether consciousness affects observation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPH-SzWF46w&t=83s (tl;dw: he doesn't think it does.) Later in the same video, he actually comes down pretty hard on the participatory universe, without naming Wheeler or using the word 'participatory' (at least post-editing): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPH-SzWF46w&t=287s

In that video, Penrose explicitly claims that quantum mechanics "is wrong". He means that the equations of quantum mechanics are not sufficient to describe the universe. He thinks you need some additional mechanics to cause wave function collapse.

Wheeler, on the other hand, does not claim that quantum mechanics is wrong or incomplete, but suggests an interpretation of the equations. So in my mind they are taking very different approaches.

I watched the later part of the video you linked where Penrose describes the thought experiment with the planet without any conscious agents. He describes wave function collapse as an objective process that is "caused" by conscious measurement. Whereas my understanding of Wheeler's ideas is that wave function collapse is a subjective process.

My recollection of Penrose's quoting in that video is that he said 'Physics collapses the wavefunction' implying he believes it is not a consciousness phenomenon.

No I agree. But in Penrose's thought experiment, he considers the consequences of theories in which consciousness causes an objective collapse.

Maybe I am missing something, but I don’t see why it’s surprising that one idea would be received with curiosity and interest, while another would be received with skepticism based on analysis from the scientific community, even though they are both ideas from prominent scientists.

It's how far either may have strayed from a materialistic viewpoint.

To paraphrase Dilbert's boss - "discussions go a lot more smoothly when no-one present understands any of the details."

i wouldn't sweat it. if orch-or works out it won't matter who was on board early. sometimes i think that a group of people guess that some theory is correct before some clever academics figure out how to prove it in a manner that satisfies the community of science, but without that rigor we'd be buried in bullshit.

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