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Comment by Noaidi | Hacker News Reader

Wow, this is such an odd response. There’s plenty of research that link microtubules to consciousness. I don’t understand this pushback other than one being sped in a certain scientific dogma that doesn’t allow new thoughts or questioning to creep in.

Just say that Penrose is a crank is way off chart in my opinion

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The word "consciousness" means at least 40 distinct things; some of those (e.g. brain being alive and functioning) are obviously connected to microtubles; others (e.g. qualia, which is what most understand Penrose invoked microtubles to explain) are so ill-defined as to be untestable and unfalsifiable.

That Penrose also seems to have a fundamental error in his understanding of the implications of Gödel's incompleteness theorems, doesn't help.

It means one thing to people who study consciousness.

https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/consciousness-is-a...

But that accepted definition is that it means everything... "What it means to be a bat" isn't a useful definition. I will accept that is what the word means and defend the viewpoint the word is thus useless.

This is the last paragraph of his article for people who aren’t going to read the whole article.

“ So yes, there is scientific confusion about what consciousness is! And there’s metaphysical confusion about what consciousness is! But there’s no definitional confusion about the word “consciousness” itself. People know what needs to be explained, it’s just that explaining the phenomenon is very hard, and no one fully has yet.“

/anything I don’t understand is useless/

That linked page is just a long-winded assertion that only their own definition counts.

It's also a definition which is completely untestable and presently unfalsifiable.

He’s a neuroscientist that studies consciousness. I think that gives him more valid reasons to have this definition than someone who programs computers.

He himself would criticise you for doing so, even just on the basis of what he put in that blog post, as you're using an argument from authority.

I believe you’re being disingenuous and hopes that no one reads the full article. Because what he said is more nuance than what you’re proposing that we should not appeal to authority. I’ll post what he said here just to be clear.

“ I fully admit that this is an appeal to authority! But saying you should rely on the framings of a scientific field, like literally just respecting how it defines terms, is extremely reasonable as an appeal. It’s also very different than saying you should blindly believe the conclusions of that field. While “trust the experts” is often too strong a claim, the much weaker ask of “use the agreed-upon vocabulary the experts use when discussing the field” is actually quite reasonable, and most people who want to have an opinion about a scientific (or philosophical) subject should respect the used terms. The same goes for consciousness.”

I think we can do better than to have this level of argumentation. Regardless if the pretending comment had a merit to it or not

What he refers to is more specifically called phenomological consciousness afaik (just skimmed through tho)

To save everyone a click: this objective definition of consciousness is "the fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basically, that there is something it is like to be that organism". This is quite obviously circular, even though it sounds fun initially.

that is NOT what the article says. read the article, it's a pretty good survey.

I love his thoughts on connecting the halting problem to understanding ala Gödel.

Penrose's theory is this: consciousness is really weird. quantum is really weird. there's got to be a connection.

Just because he is brilliant in one field doesn't mean he's remotely competent in every field.

He came up with his idea in collaboration with scientist to study consciousness. It’s not his idea really it’s a group of people’s ideas. His brilliance in his field contributed to the brilliance of other people’s fields. This is how collaborative science works.

If you seen any of Penrose’s talks or read any of his books, you know that this was not fundamentally his idea.

Yup, even the Dioso-Penrose limit has two sides. https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.13490

Paraphrasing here: The paper above was looking for energy given off during collapse, (which they did not find) on the Diosi side, where Penrose' idea is more in the retro-causal, you wouldn't find an energy signature. I am sure someone can call out a better representation, but similar to your response that Roger has these ideas and looks for collaborators, but still has his own ideas on things that may differ.

Interesting seeing this conversation going on, Roger / Stuarts work has been trashed over the years, Max Tegmark did the maths and said brain is too wet/warm for any quantum stuff, but we've been finding this in tubulin* and other places, never retracted the paper.

Either way, consciousness is amazing, and a mystery, anyone interested should come to Tucson in April for Towards a science of Consciousness, good conversations, interesting people, usually more questions than answers.

https://www.mdpi.com/2673-9321/4/2/19 https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jpcb.3c07936

No, there's no evidence against Tegmark's math.

Finding isolated quantum effects is emphatically unsurprising: after all, everything is quantum. It's just limited in locality, which is basically what Tegmark is talking about (locality and decoherence time being somewhat dual).

There is no evidence for the kind of quantum effects that would involve multiple neurons. This is quite a block, since afaik, even the quantum-woo types (Penrose, emphatically) are not claiming that consciousness comes from the quantum behavior of a single neuron. (And that would be profoundly ignorant of basic neuroscience.)

There is this from Max - https://journals.aps.org/pre/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevE.61.41...

And response

https://journals.aps.org/pre/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevE.65.06...

> in collaboration with scientist

If you mean Stuart Hameroff, he's no scientist.

Nah. He postulated that mathematicians don't make errors and proposed a hypothetical physical mechanism to make it work.

Also microtubules with quantum…

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