Japanese is full of loanwords precisely because those good folks on the other side of the world find so many things about Western culture fascinating.
My Japanese father-in-law even played QB and Safety for his university's American-style football team in the 80s and grew up as a fan of Jack Lambert and Mean Joe Greene.
Many people in Japan are just as much "Americanophiles" as some of us are "Japanophiles".
Their word for (part time) job (as opposed to career position) is literally the German word for "work": arbeit.
Of course transliterated with some minor phonetic loss, but that's expected.
"How did they do it? As it turns out, crime. Unable to reverse engineer the chip, Tengen convinced the United States Copyright Office to hand over the source code of the lockout chip, claiming it was necessary for a lawsuit. With the code in hand, Tengen could make their own clone with ease. And Tengen was going to sue Nintendo for antitrust violations, so they probably figured they could get away with it."
This has got to be the most Cobra Kai thing a company has ever done to another company for the benefit of consumers, and I love every bit of it.
The lockout chip isn't related to the converters, per se. The converter has a lockout chip, but so does every official NES game.
The Famicom didn't have any kind of protection scheme, so unlicensed and bootleg games were commonplace; Nintendo added the lockout mechanism for the international release precisely in response to that. Each cartridge contains a "key" chip that unlocks the "lock" chip on the NES main board, which then releases the reset line on the CPU allowing it to operate.
Naturally, this means that Famicom carts don't have the lockout mechanism, so those signals need to come from the converter.
> The Famicom didn't have any kind of protection scheme, so unlicensed and bootleg games were commonplace
Unlicensed/bootleg Famicom games weren't very common in Japan due to the control Nintendo had over game distribution. In Japan, Nintendo sold all their Famicom consoles and games through a wholesaler organization called Shoshinkai. If you wanted to sell Famicom games without a license from Nintendo, you needed to deal directly with stores and/or wholesalers who both wanted to sell Famicom games and didn't sell any Nintendo products. This limited unlicensed games to being niche underground products that were mainly sold in back-alley shops and through mail order. In the US, this level of control over distribution would probably be ruled anticompetitive, so the lockout chip was a technical solution that accomplished a similar goal.
There was also another method of bypassing the lockout chip that some of those awful bible games used. It was to put a capacitor in the cartridge to literally shock the lockout chip, disabling it long enough for the game to boot.
I don't see how being compensated for giving your organ to someone else is worse than being told you can either give it away for free or not at all.
Imagine if billionaires had to pay the "riff-raff" organ donors to continue living their vain and hollow lives instead of bribing hospitals and public officials to cut in line. If I were old and on my way out the door, this would give me a chance to leave something behind for my wife and kids.
Let's say I have a heart condition or neurodegenerative disease and I'm living on borrowed time. I could make at least a couple hundred thousand selling 1 lobe out of my very healthy liver to a desperate billionaire. Knowing my heart or brain will give out long before my liver, I can accept my fate and die with courage and dignity and as an added bonus, also help my family by profiteering off of the cowardice and selfishness of people like Larry Ellison or Jeff Bezos.
You're right, but it still sucks that my car now depreciates as fast as my Macbook. I don't think batteries will ever hold their value though, and those things constitute at least $10k of an EV's sticker price.
Hopefully as EVs become less ugly-looking, the body and interior hold their value, even if the value of the battery depreciates rapidly.
If somebody made an EV that looked like a 1980s Rolls Royce Corniche- something tasteful- I would buy an EV.
But _why_ would the battery depreciate so much? My 4 year old EV can drive the same distance as it could when it was new. The data we have on EVs just doesn’t support the idea that their range drops a cliff at some point. And if they do, you’re mostly able to have it fixed by swapping the faulty cell module. Which more and more places are able to do. And even when it reaches the end of life, it’s still good for grid applications.
So the way I see it, the EV resale value is really due to two factors. One being that, yes, the typical EV buyer is able to buy new. And the other being knee jerk reaction to used EVs that’s mostly emotion-based.
I expect the resale value become better in some years. And I fully expect end of life EVs costing more than end of life ICE cars, because the battery will definitely be more valuable than a scrap pile.
It seems the once "Great" Britain cannot let go of its grandiose delusions of ruling over and "civilizing" the entire known world.
I've always held onto the suspicion that the distinction between left-wing and right-wing social views is more aesthetic than philosophical. All you have to do is tell a leftist "no", and they turn into everything they hate about their parents.
I don't think the psychology here is one of British world supremacy. I think it's one of moral supremacy where liberals in power think that laws must be subservient to the "greater good". This is pretty common in modern politics actually. People don't understand that government must operate on rule of law, and laws have tradeoffs. A law that is useful to take down mafia might also be misused to take down protesters. As such making laws is much more complex than taking a moral stand. But people would rather morally grandstand than wade into this complexity.
A marathon consists of two halves: the first 20 miles, and then the last 10k (6.2mi) when you're more sore and tired than you've ever been in your life.
This is 100% unrelated to the original article but I feel like there's an underreported additional first half. As a bigger runner who still loves to run, the first two or three miles before I have enough endorphins to get into the zen state that makes me love running is the first half, then it's 17 miles of this amazing meditative mindset. Then the last 10k sucks.
Ha! Endorphins are "endogenous opioid peptides produced by the pituitary and hypothalamus glands that function as the body's natural painkillers and mood regulators".
"They are part of the endogenous opioid system", so either way was talking about literal highs.
The endocannabinoid system (I hope that I have the spelling correct) is a relatively recent discovery (1980s on), and is quite fascinating on how integral to the human body it is
I suspect that is true for many difficult physical goals.
My dad told me that the first time you climb a mountain, there will likely be a moment not too distant from the top when you would be willing to just sit down and never move again, even at the risk to your own life. Even as you can see the goal not far away.
He also said that it was a dangerous enough situation that as a climb leader he'd start kicking you if he had to, if you sat down like that and refused to keep climbing. I'm not a climber myself, though, so this is hearsay, and my dad is long dead and unable to remind me of what details I've forgotten.
Because it would be 16 miles of bliss and 4 miles of torture then. The point is the last section of the run is always significantly harder - it’s even the same for 5k
I've heard it claimed that an ultramarathon is fundamentally a different experience because while it definitely requires excellent physical stamina, it has a large mental component to it, as well as a much bigger focus on nutrition. Very different sort of race, I guess.
there are multiple cycles from highs to lows and back and then typically a larger dominant split similar what was discussed here for the marathon but scaled to the distance.
Yes. I've run numerous 50Ks, 50 milers, 100ks and 100 milers. I felt like crap after 20 miles in almost all of them. Most of getting better at ultramarathons is learning to keep going when feeling like crap. Oddly, the one race that was an exception is probably the hardest one of them I did on paper - in that case I was going so slowly from the beginning that I never really hit a 20 mile wall.
20 miles is still a challenge, and how many people run marathons because someone else is impressed if you run 26 miles, but couldn't care less if you run 20?
The OP's article does a lot more to disprove such a hypothesis by instead offering a more credible alternative explanation:
Neurons found in the CNS have tubles large enough to allow transport of ions and even relatively large polypeptides similar to, but more permissive than, the well-known gap junctions found between smooth muscle and cardiac muscle cells.
Penrose's hypothesis is crank science about quantum gravity messing with your CNS in a way comparable to "body thetans" in Scientology.
In 1989, Penrose picked up Lucas' 1961 argument that no computer can possibly simulate intelligence. The argument rests on fundamental misunderstandings of logic, that are well-known among logicians. See, for example, https://www.ams.org/journals/bull/1995-32-03/S0273-0979-1995... for an article explaining this, written some 30 years ago.
The fact that Penrose has maintained his misunderstandings for 30 years, demonstrates that, on this topic, he has been a crank for a long time. No matter his other accomplishments.
The fact that he repeated the same logic errors at book length doesn't change the fact that they are errors. And the question of whether they are logic errors is a question of mathematics, not philosophy. Dismissing the conclusions of logic on the basis of philosophy, is a mistake of the same type as dismissing the conclusions of science on the basis of theology. Logic cannot speak to the philosophy that Penrose pushes forth. But it can and does speak to the validity of the argument from logic that he puts forth in support.
Hilary Putnam did a good job of explaining the mistakes. I am not a logician, but my background in logic is good enough to verify the explanation. And every logician that I personally know has come to the same conclusion.
Like you, I find it absurd to claim that Penrose has been doubling down on a basic logic error. And yet we have the basic logic error, and Penrose has clearly been doubling down on it.
You don't even need to be an expert to understand that he can't be right. Penrose argues that the capacities of human reasoning is such that Gödel's theorem proves that a mathematician's brain cannot be replicated by any mechanical process. But the reasoning process that mathematicians use is fallible. The output most emphatically is not logically consistent. The appearance of consistency is only obtained after much reexamination of those errors which were discovered. Absolute certainty of lack of error is unachievable by any kind of human reasoning. The history of mathematics is filled with examples of errors that were not discovered for shockingly long periods.
So we do not have a proof of the consistency of human reasoning, or its products. Therefore Gödel doesn't apply. Human reasoning, including the outputs that Penrose cites, do not strictly follow first order logic. Therefore Gödel again doesn't apply. And Gödel is entirely silent on the potential prospects of a heuristic algorithm that can produce inconsistent results. Which is what our brains do.
The inapplicability of Gödel's theorem to our thinking process is an absolute barrier to Penrose's attempts to prove that our thinking process cannot be the result of a mechanical system. It may be that it is not. Personally I fail to see how a strictly mechanical process can create my experience of consciousness. But this is a question that Gödel's theorem cannot address.
The summary is that there is no requirement that human reasoning is infallible in his actual argument.
Again his proof may be faulty. But it is not because of a “basic logic error”. The disagreements people have with his actual argument are much much subtler than a basic logic error.
The mistake that you are making is to imagine that I must be making a mistake.
Let's take a few examples.
He claims that a robot which is able to engage in Gödelian reasoning, cannot possibly be computable. Logicians agree that this claim is false. Indeed https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10817-021-09599-8 shows a version of Gödel's theorem that has been fully checked via proof assistant. While we still lack AIs that are able to produce such proofs (other than by regurgitating such proofs in their input data), in principle a proof checker filtering the output of a brute force search through possible proof attempts will achieve any possible machine checked proofs. But proof checkers can proof check Gödelian reasoning. Thus we already know how to write a (rather impracticable) robot that does exactly what Penrose claims to be impossible.
Here's a whopper. Let's go to this passage from 4.2 of his rebuttal.
However, I had been disturbed by the possibility that there might be true mathematical propositions that were in principle inaccessible to human reason. Upon learning the true form of Gödel's theorem (in the way that Steen presented it), I was enormously gratified to hear that it asserted no such thing; for it established, instead, that the powers of human reason could not be limited to any accepted preassigned system of formalized rules. What Gödel showed was how to transcend any such system of rules, so long as those rules could themselves be trusted.
This is complete and utter bullshit. Gödel did not show that we could transcend any such system of rules. What Gödel demonstrated is what those rules can prove of themselves. Namely, "If this set of axioms proves itself consistent, then it is inconsistent." Which statement can be proven using nothing more than arithmetic. Our ability to prove this doesn't prove that our mathematical reasoning is somehow beyond what a mere formal system can prove. It is just a demonstration that we can follow a piece of arithmetic to its logical conclusion. Any other understanding of the result is simply a mistake.
He's also wrong about whether there are problems that, in principle, are beyond human reason. For example consider the BB(n) problem. Identifying which Turing machine gives us BB(643) is impossible from ZFC. (See https://github.com/CatsAreFluffy/metamath-turing-machines for more.) If you go to BB(1000), no set of axioms that mathematics has ever debated can suffice. Going beyond human comprehension doesn't take much more than that.
Of course those are weak estimates. In fact it is likely that BB(10) is going to be forever beyond us. And no, some magic quantum decoherence in the microtubules isn't going to fix that.
Let's move on. Section 4.5. He admits to the logical possibility that he is wrong, then asks whether unsoundness is plausible. How is it not plausible? The only form of intelligence that we have an existence proof for, us, thinks in notoriously unreliable ways. LLMs are our best attempt to replicate our verbal abilities by computers. They are likewise extremely unsound.
The burden of proof that soundness is possible here is on Penrose. And he needs to prove it soundly enough to overturn the generally accepted conclusion that the known laws of physics suffices, in principle, to explain the manner by which our brains operate. Because that is the conclusion that he is aiming to convince people of.
He doesn't even try. He waves his hands, declares absurdity, and moves on. That may be fine from the point of view of his philosophy. It is not fine from the point of view of a logician. It's a gap. And a mighty big one at that.
I could go on, but what's the point? If you refuse to believe what logicians say about logic, then no explanation of what logicians have to say will convince you. And if you do believe what logicians say about logic, then you should already know that Penrose is wrong.
As Penrose points out, the claim is conditional. Take a recursively axiomatized theory T for which we have Pi_1 soundness level warrant, i.e., we have reason to think its Pi_1 theorems are true in the standard model N for the arithmetical cases we care about. Then we can see (again: in N) that G_T is true while T cannot prove it.
That gives principled grounds to adopt Pi_1 reflection or otherwise step to a stronger T'. No infallibility claim about people is require. This mirrors the ordinary kind of warrant mathematicians use when they adopt new axioms after scrutiny and debate.
>A proof checker plus brute-force search can do Gödel reasoning, so a robot can do it.
A checker plus search enumerates exactly the theorems of whatever fixed system it’s tied to. You can also script computable progressions that iterate reflection or consistency along recursive ordinal notations in the Turing/Feferman style. That’s still a single computable progression determined in advance. It isn’t that such progressions don’t exist, but that our justified acceptance is not a priori bounded by any one fixed computable progression.
The mechanist reply here is an existence thesis: there exists some computable procedure whose output matches everything humans could in principle come to rightly endorse for arithmetic. If that’s your view, give the existence argument. If instead you propose a specific computable progression P that we could in principle ratify as Pi_1 sound in toto, Gödel/reflection immediately pushes past P. If you say we can’t justifiably ratify P as a whole, you’ve conceded the point that no single precommitted computable scheme captures the moving boundary of what we’re warranted to accept.
>Gödel didn’t show transcendence.
In the narrow sense above, Gödel shows how to go beyond any accepted, fixed rule set once we have Pi_1 soundness level warrant for it. That is exactly the move at issue. Note the scope: inside a system you can’t adopt “if provable then true” without collapse by Löb. Outside, adopting restricted Pi_1 reflection is the justified step. If you want to reject the move, reject the warrant. Deny that we sometimes justifiably regard a given fragment of T as Pi_1 sound for the cases at hand. That’s an objection about epistemic warrant, not a logic gotcha.
>Busy Beaver shows limits, so case closed.
Busy Beaver actually helps here. It yields concrete Sigma_1 statements that can be independent of strong base theories, illustrating that warrant-driven extensions are sometimes needed to settle specific instances.
Either sometimes we do have adequate Pi_1 level meta warrant for a theory T on the arithmetical claims we care about. In which case we can recognize G_T as true in N and rightly move to T', ensuring our recognitions outrun that fixed T. Or deny such warrant altogether, in which case you haven’t refuted the conditional. You’ve just changed the target to a weaker notion of “what we can recognize.” The “humans are unsound” line doesn’t touch that conditional, and “just use a checker plus search” doesn’t answer the challenge unless you can support the existence of a single computable theory or precommitted progression that captures everything we could in principle come to rightly accept for arithmetic.
yup and his book was reviewed as such at the time. mention of the rejection of his theory by professional philosophers however keeps getting edited out of the wikipedia page. See this exchange on the talk page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:The_Emperor%27s_New_Mind
>> "The book's thesis is considered erroneous by experts in the fields of philosophy, computer science, and robotics."
> Wooooah, there. That's a massive accusation to add, unsourced, and without any discussion. There needs to be a source for this statement, not to mention an opposing view. It seems unlikely the guy would win an award for a book no one thinks is right. I'm deleting it unless someone comes up with a pretty good source. Joker1189 (talk) 20:43, 27 July 2010 (UTC)
The Penrose–Lucas argument about the implications of Gödel's incompleteness theorem for computational theories of human intelligence was criticized by mathematicians,[16][17][18][19] computer scientists,[20] and philosophers,[21][22][23][24][25] and the consensus among experts[7] in these fields is that the argument fails,[26][27][28] with different authors attacking different aspects of the argument.[28][29]
so, rejected by consensus. someone should update the book page so this expert rejection is clearer.
Everyone is obvious hyperbole because I didn’t want to both copying and pasting the actual quote.
That is merely a compiled list of people who disagree with him without listing any of his supporters.
There are at least 5 philosophers who support his position if you follow those links and 5 who reject it.
Link 7 doesn’t support the statement “consensus among experts in these fields” because it only refers to a single field—philosophy.
Many of those sources are just links to lists that other people have compiled of arguments for and against Lucas’ argument. They aren’t even all critiques. And many of the ones that are, are already linked directly in the article.
There’s is nothing more to support the notion that there is widespread consensus against his argument.
I can't speak to the general opinion among philosophers about his argument. But my opinion about philosophy is such that their opinion would not sway mine in either way.
I can speak to the general opinion of his logical arguments among logicians. And it is not just widespread consensus against. It is a widespread consensus that the argument is filled with basic logic errors that render it absolutely wrong.
As Hilary Putnam points out, Penrose's arguments are even worse than Lucas'. In particularly Penrose argues that no program that we can know to be sound, can simulate all our human mathematical competence. But our brains do not use a sound thinking process. Therefore a sufficiently good simulation of our brains that it can do mathematics, would also not be sound. Gödel's theorem is entirely silent on the potential capabilities of such unsound systems.
Furthermore LLMs provide a convincing demonstration that unsound simulations of us can have surprising levels of competence. ChatGPT regularly demonstrates both its competence and unsoundness. Sometimes at the same time!
The potential for unsound systems to demonstrate competence far beyond what most expected, is demonstrated by LLMs. Admittedly the current error rate is unacceptably high. But it demonstrates that what Penrose claimed to be mathematically impossible, may plausibly become real within our lifetimes. (Though, given how old Penrose is, not his.)
But in section 4.5 of this "rebuttal", he admits to the flaw that I just pointed out, and dismisses it as logically possible but absurd. The fact that he grants that it is logically possible, demonstrates that his attempted logical demonstration is broken.
Also his opinion on absurdity has to be weighed against the unlikeliness of his conclusion that the known laws of physics will not suffice to explain the operation of the brain. Clearly that question is not as cut and dried as he believes.
That's the problem with Penrose's thinking though. He's absolutely convinced that consciousness cannot boil down to something computable. So he reaches for the quantum shelf, but not just the quantum shelf, the quantum processes we don't yet understand since otherwise it'd just be something computable, but with more steps.
I mean most AI researchers are utterly convinced that the human brain is a Turing machine. There’s not reason to presuppose that. And if everyone presupposes that and it isn’t true, we’ll be stuck spinning our wheels until someone questions it.
This isn't a viewpoint coming from AI, is been a view that's been around for quite some time. The standard model does an exquisite job of predicting the day to day physics we experience. To find search for new physics where we might find discrepancies, we have to build absolutely huge colliders, and even those don't really effect our "day to day" physics.
For consciousness to be based on some non computable function there would have to be some unknown physics occurring in the brain. Sure, that's hard to disprove, but it also strains credulity, hard.
Penrose picking "quantum" for being the element of physics that would have to change to allow this non computibility is just woo. Why not just say magic?
I agree with you that picking quantum was probably the fad of the time and it was an easy pick as quantum is everywhere. He cold have said "electrons". However the argument against unknown physics is not very sound IMHO.
There has been unknown physics at play inside brains since forever and it still is and always will be, by definition of science.
The point is that we don't even know how to define consciousness and humanity doesn't have a shared agreement about which living beings are conscious or are not. We're still like engineers building things millennia or centuries ago with only a shadow of a theory of why their creations worked. And yet we still walk on bridges from 2000 years ago and we had electric batteries and power plants before knowing how an electro magnetic wave moved.
If it were known that there where physical interactions occurring within the brain that deviated from the standard model, we wouldn't bother building didn't colliders.
Even if the brain showed a real deviation from the Standard Model, we’d still need colliders. The brain is a messy, low energy environment, and observation isn’t identification.
Colliders provide clean, high energy tests to pin down masses, spins, and couplings, and we already need them for open problems. A bio anomaly would set targets, not replace colliders.
It has always been related to AI. Shortly after Church and Turing formalized computability, people started squaring off into 2 camps. People who believed strong AI was possible and those who didn’t.
We know the standard model is incomplete. Penrose’s ideas come directly from his his explorations of the gaps he suspects exist.
There are people that come to it from the direction of AI because they think they know something about consciousness. That's certainly putting the conclusion first.
But there are also physicists who come at the problem from the direction of physics. We know the standard model is incomplete, but we also know it covers everyone we experience with exquisite precision. Unless there is a black hole or temperatures on par with the big bang going on within our brain, the standard model will tell you what you need to know
You are vastly overstating the certainty of your position. Many physicists, including Penrose (even if ignoring his consciousness arguments) are deeply unsatisfied with the standard model and believe that it is incomplete. Despite understanding how useful it can be.
It is very unlikely that it can tell you “everything you need to know” or even everything that could possibly be useful.
Even if that were the case we have no way of knowing that or even supporting that with our current understanding. That takes that statement thoroughly outside of the realm of science and into philosophy.
>Unless there is a black hole or temperatures on par with the big bang going on within our brain, the standard model will tell you what you need to know
Do you think that if it were that simple, that a world renowned physicist would capable of doing the back of the envelope math?
Also do you think that if it were that simple that this world renowned physicist could consistently convince other world renowned physicists to engage with him beyond simple 1 paragraph rebuttals? To the point where they will write entire chapters in books published by him?
You may not find his argument convincing, but his arguments aren’t dismissed as crank science outside of edgy internet posts.
The standard model is universally understood to be incomplete, but the problem is that it's perfectly able to predict all known interactions we can measure. We need to go to much higher energies to find violations. And the refinements we have been doing (higgs, etc) have no effect on our understanding of biology.
Penrose claims that violations of the standard model must exist within table top experiments. Not because of any specific objections to the standard model, but because of philosophical objections related to the nature of consciousness. And so it doesn't point to where those violations must be, but instead just a blind search.
As far as I know, professionals are too kind to refer to Penrose as a crank due to his extensive contributions to physics and mathematics. But his claims here are related to neither physics not mathematics but the philosophy of consciousness, an area where he hasn't made any discoveries. Professionals are happy to refer to his ideas as "highly implausible" or even as useful as "pixie-dust in the synapses".
Penrose’s target is the linear, always-unitary dynamics of quantum mechanics at mesoscopic scales, not the SM’s particle content. If objective reduction is right, you get departures from linear superposition when the gravitational self-energy of a mass distribution in superposition is large enough. That is a modification of quantum dynamics, not “new SM particles.”
The core OR argument is a physics claim about the tension between quantum superpositions and general relativistic spacetime. Orch-OR is the separate move that tries to tie OR events to consciousness. You can reject the neuroscience and still take the collapse model as a testable physical hypothesis.
The search isn’t “blind.” OR gives a quantitative target: a collapse timescale on the order of ħ divided by the gravitational self
energy of the superposed mass. That points directly to masses, separations, and coherence times where interference should fail or excess diffusion or heating should appear. That is exactly what the tabletop program probes.
Penrose argues that linear QM should break at some mesoscopic scale set by gravity. Whether today’s experiments reach the right regime is an empirical question.
Penrose objects for reasons beyond his consciousness theories. He has long argued that standard QM is incomplete and needs an objective collapse law tied to gravity, and he has broader critiques of mainstream frameworks. The tabletop predictions come from the OR physics, not from the consciousness story.
Penrose’ treatment by the physics establishment goes far beyond kindness.
He regularly convinces working physicists to work with him. He has even convinced world renowned physicists to publish entire chapters in his books debating him. This isn’t something that happens to someone dismissed as a crank. World renowned physicists don’t engage with crank physics.
It happens. It’s surely possible. But does it happen enough that anytime a Nobel laureate says something a little out there, this is the immediate explanation?
Especially if what he’s saying has lacks a major hallmark of crackpot theories. That is he is very open to his theory being wrong and he won’t even say that it’s probably correct. He just thinks it’s possible and would like to see more work done on it.
Yes in that when they something outside their field that’s ‘a little out there’ Nobel laureate’s aren’t as a group more useful than random noise. Similarly a crank can happen to say a true statement, but the issue is the process with which the statement is derived is flawed to the point of uselessness.
The derogatory aspect of calling someone a crank is obviously uncalled for, but as a shorthand it’s not unreasonable to use the term.
If a Nobel laureate says they have an interesting hypothesis that they’d like test and that idea isn’t obviously impossible, it’s probably best not to dismiss it as crank science.
Walter Alvarez is another Nobel laureate who proposed a theory that an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs. Many people thought that was crank science.
And it’s important to note he had another out there idea that there were hidden chambers in the pyramids of Egypt. That one turned out to be wrong.
What distinguished his theories from crank science is that he was open to the idea that they were wrong and was interested in actually using the scientific method to investigate them.
> it’s probably best not to dismiss it as crank science
Why? There’s a lot of Nobel laureates over time who collectively made many such claims, so you can easily pick examples in both directions.
My point is more such ideas aren’t accurate enough for anything beyond preliminary testing by actual scientific investigation which sometimes does validate them but also commonly disproves them. There’s zero reason for the average person to consider their validity.
Your example is a perfect demonstration of why most people ignoring such things is a good idea, these things don’t simply disappear without investigation.
Who says you have to believe it or pay attention to it? What does an average person gain by paying attention to unproven theories in any discipline. If it interests you, pay attention, if it doesn’t, don’t.
I just said you shouldn’t dismiss it as crank science.
He has good relationships and is respected by experts in many fields. If he was dismissed as a crank he couldn’t have found 3 incredibly respected scientists to debate his theories in one of his books.
Plenty of people think his theories are wrong or unlikely. The only people “dismissing them as crank science” are people in that have unwavering faith in the idea that consciousness arises from computable processes.
Maybe it is, Nobel prize winners might be so hyper-specialized in their field that they have superficial at best understandings of others. Engineer’s Disease writ large.
He’s been writing on consciousness for 40 years now and he’s been studying the topic since undergrad. Also most of what he talks about is soundly within his field.
The only thing that’s really not is the microtuble thing and he collaborated with someone else on that.
That’s also the least interesting thing he says I think because he admits it’s just an interesting place to look for quantum effects and he has no idea if he’s right.
Nothing that Penrose has talked about in re consciousness is "soundly within his field" other than "the microtubule thing" and his collaborator, anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff, is a crank among cranks.
Also, Penrose has not been "studying the topic since undergrad" ... he's been bothered by the notion that he is "just a computer" since then, but he didn't get into seriously addressing it until much later, and he's never studied it--he notoriously ignores the entirety of the literature of philosophy of mind and neuroscience.
> That’s also the least interesting thing he says I think because he admits it’s just an interesting place to look for quantum effects and he has no idea if he’s right.
This is simply not accurate.
And the fact is that Penrose is completely irrelevant to the subject of consciousness other than via an argument from invalid authority.
P.S. The response is disingenuous and discrediting ... I won't respond to that person again, especially after seeing this comment: "I’m in the Penrose camp that Turing machines can’t be conscious which is required for true AGI" --- this is pure ideology. TMs are clearly adequate for AGI even if somehow "TMs can't be conscious" ... c.f. Chalmers' philosophical zombies.
It's a lie to claim that I said or even implied this.
OTOH, the "camp that Turing machines can't be conscious" is pure ideology and is based on repeatedly proven logic errors--Lucas was known to be wrong about Godel before Penrose came along and embraced his errors. And it's very common for people in that camp to project their own unsubstantiated baseless faith "that Turing machines can't be conscious" (which for Penrose, like many others in the camp, was a consequence of a semi-religious metaphysical notion that he wasn't "just a computer") onto rational informed people, with rhetoric like "people in that have unwavering faith in the idea that consciousness arises from computable processes" -- it's the logically default position, a consequence of intelligence and knowledge, not faith. The hilarious thing is that "consciousness arises from quantum effects" doesn't get the no-TM faithers what they want--they're still "just" machines, even if the machines use qubits rather than bits.
Man you’re replying all over the place, I’m having a hard time keeping up. You’re also spending a lot of time on arguing with someone who has been discredited over a theory that has been discredited.
Penrose and Lucas’ argument may or may not be correct, but that still doesn’t imply that consciousness can arise from computable processes. There is no reason that it should. There is absolutely nothing to suggest this should be the default position.
The only way to get to this position is through faith. Doesn’t mean you’re wrong. But it’s not a falsifiable position since you can’t prove consciousness.
Keeping consciousness undefined means the requirements to form it are also undefined. There’s no way kizzip can arise from computers, there’s no way kizzip can arise from anything other than computers.
If you agree that nothing implies that it should and nothing implies that it shouldn’t. Picking one side or the other and declaring that should be the default is an unsupported statement of belief.
It is perfectly fine for you to adopt that belief. My issue is in declaring that belief to be self-evident support for calling someone a crank.
Indeed there is nothing to suggest that it shouldn't and in fact everything suggests that it should. There's a reason that Penrose goes to such lengths to try--erroneously--to prove that Godel's theorems are beyond the grasp of computers ... which is bizarre since they are theorems of arithmetic and as such can be mechanically derived. The default position is that consciousness, whatever it is, is a physical process of the brain, and the default position is that the processes of the human brain are subject to the Church-Turing thesis. People who say otherwise frankly have no idea what they are talking about. And when they proclaim that they are in "the camp that says that TMs cannot produce consciousness" then it's intellectually dishonest to an extreme to deny that they are acting on faith, and to later pretend that they have an open mind and that it's the people who actually have an education in this arena who have a faith-based position.
You just placed biology and neuroscience firmly outside of his wheelhouse. Just the size of the structures involved, temperature, timescales, and distance between neurons alone is a serious problem with his theory here.
If he is approaching things from a purely hypothetical standpoint it’s an unlikely but reasonable idea, but it utterly fails as part of how a larger system we actually understand quite a bit about works. Which is always the hard part of science, you’re not just fitting a single curve but thousands of different datasets.
>You just placed biology and neuroscience firmly outside of his wheelhouse.
For biology he had a collaborator. You aren’t likely to find many biologist / quantum physicists.
The term neuroscience wasn’t even coined until after he finished his PhD. You could probably name many other relevant sub specialties that doesn’t have formal training in.
If any of his theories are correct, you wouldn’t expect a neuroscientist, or biologist to be equipped to come up with them.
>If he is approaching things from a purely hypothetical standpoint it’s an unlikely but reasonable idea
He is. His first book essentially had no proposed mechanism. Then an anesthesiologist and researcher read it and contacted him with the proposal that microtubules might provide an environment that is insulated from the normal warm, wet, and noisy environment of the brain.
His next book investigated that idea, but he’s repeatedly said that this is just an interesting place to investigate and he has no idea whether it’s true.
>but it utterly fails as part of how a larger system we actually understand quite a bit about works.
How does it fail? I’ve read quite a hit about it and plenty for people are skeptical but I’ve never seen anyone showing how it “utterly fails”.
The first car wasn’t called a car by the people who built it, but we back date terms. He’s not a neuroscientist because he’s not studied the brain’s physical structures.
> insulated from the normal warm, wet, and noisy environment of the brain
? The tube is made of atoms at the same temperature as what’s outside the tube, there’s no isolation here.
> How does it fail?
It fails in many many ways. Individual neurons are vastly too small for consensus to occur on that scale you need something involving millions of them at body temperature at the very low end. Local quantum effects are obviously going on but they don’t scale.
The first car wasn’t built by an “automotive engineer” either. But by someone from another discipline who decided they were interested in applying the knowledge from other disciplines to the this new one.
Penrose has certainly studied the brains physical structures. He has 40 years of books and papers published on the subject.
>same temperature
No one is proposing that they are literally thermally insulating.
> on that scale you need something involving millions of them at body temperature at the very low end. Local quantum effects are obviously going on but they don’t scale.
That sounds like a good problem for a Nobel Prize winning physicist to investigate. If a neuroscientist were investigating it, I’d expect them to bring in a physicist.
The first car wasn’t by definition engineered by an automotive engineer?
> That sounds like a good problem for a Nobel Prize winning physicist to investigate.
No that’s a fairly trivial problem anyone with an understanding of QM can investigate. Atoms are atoms here it doesn’t really matter what biological structures are involved they are floating around in warm water.
> The first car wasn’t by definition engineered by an automotive engineer?
If that’s the definition we’re going with, then anyone who does research that touches on neuroscience is a neuroscientist.
>trivial
Calling it trivial is hand-waving. Tegmark’s fast-decoherence bounds hinge on specific parameter choices; change the dielectric, charge model, spacing, or geometry and the timescales move into a regime that might matter. Temperature equality doesn’t erase structure. Ordered environments and collective modes can suppress decoherence without “insulating the brain.” Microtubules are a testable hypothesis, not a creed.
If you think they fail, point to a concrete model that rules out coherence under corrected parameters or shows a clash with measured neural dynamics and energy budgets. “Warm water, case closed” is an assertion, not that model.
Sure! Happy to. Here's an example of a circular argument: "Penrose could be a crank. We know that kind of thing is possible because, for instance, Penrose is a crank."
The argument made was nothing like that. The assertion made was
"You can be a genius in one field and a crank in another."
Supporting evidence was offered: "For example: Penrose."
One can dispute the evidence, but there's nothing circular about the argument--your version is a strawman created precisely in an attempt to turn a non-circular argument into a circular one. And even rejecting that evidence there's plenty of other evidence and others here gave examples. Not that examples are even needed, as the assertion is self-evident, and was offered as a counter to a textbook fallacious argument from authority: "he's easily done enough important science work to not be called a crank". There is no basis at all for such a claim. Perhaps Penrose is not a crank in re consciousness, but it certainly doesn't follow from the fact that he's done the highest caliber non-crank science ... that claim is fallacious, disingenuous, and intellectually dishonest.
There's no evidence that they couldn't pick a different person. There are quite a few other persons and some other commenters pointed out some of them.
His "speculation" is litereally: I think quantum is mysterious, and brains are mysterious, so there must be quantum in the brain. That's just silly - even if
only because his opinions about mysteriousity is of no importance.
By Occam's razor, it could be said that offering an alternative hypothesis that explains all facts equally well but is also simpler does "disprove" more complex hypotheses. For example, it is often said that Einstein's special theory of relativity disproved the idea of an aether - but special relativity is compatible with the existence of an aether with certain properties, it just is a completely unnecessary extra complication.
That the brain uses electrical/chemical signals is crank science about subatomic particles messing with your aura in a way comparable to "body thetans" in Scientology.
If that were not so, electrical/chemical engineers could upgrade our brains with their knowledge of electricity/chemistry.
Scientific progress is thinking about stuff. And my Occam's razor is leaning toward "if just arithmetic could yield consciousness we would have figured it out by now".
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
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.
He’s a neuroscientist that studies consciousness. I think that gives him more valid reasons to have this definition than someone who programs computers.
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.”
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.“
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.
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.
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.
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.)
The common understanding is that at the molecular scale that your nervous system operates, quantum effects are averaged out and don't lead to instability of neuronal activity.
Again there, does the EMF/RF field created by the electrovolt wave function of the brain affect the electrovolt wave function of the brain? If so, isn't that a feed-forward feedback loop (where there may be quantum behavior)?
Does this paper also fail to assess other fields relevant to understanding nonlocal neuroactivation in disproving that there is any quantumness in cognition?
How do humans simulate digital and quantum circuits with the brain?
And, why do attempts to localize activations in the brain weeks apart fail; why is there representation drift?
What behavior precisely do you think is hiding in quantum region?
I'm on board with Hofstadter's strange loops but at most, quantum-level interaction should just amount to noise that is stabilized by the higher-order chemical region in which the brain operates. What even are we looking for at this point?
What aspect of my experience is not likely to just be a result of chemical interactions in the brain?
That's the magic of action potentials. As sodium ions (+1 charge) propagate, they dissipate throughout the cytosol and sometimes leak out of the cell membrane, but they also trigger their own influx of regenerative current by opening voltage-gated ion channels on the cell membrane. Think of it as a "signal repeater".
As long as the initial stimulus is strong enough to trigger an action potential, the signal propagates all the way from the nerve ending to the central nervous system, and whatever response the CNS cooks up always makes it all the way to all the muscles it intends to trigger. Stated another way, the peripheral and central nervous system have enough of these signal repeaters for any signal to travel anywhere.
