Short story of Roger Penrose's work on conciousness

*Description*
A short story of Roger Penrose's views and works on consciousness. These views are highly controversial and criticisms of his works are also included in this video.

*Some links (including resources used to make this video)*

*Contact Info*
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#penrose #conciousness #microtubules #physics #tegmark #emperorsnewmind #mathematics #godel #rogerpenrose

[DrWhom]

I really liked _The Road to Reality_ although it is riddled with mistakes, great and small - which doesn't really matter since the specialist knows what it's meant to say and the non-specialist, well, Penrose lost them round about page 10. It does show that he's bad at proofreading his own work (as are we all) and that nobody else went through the text in any depth. And still I like it, it's very idiosyncratic.

The bit about the end about how proposal for marrying QM and GR (ha ha, marriage proposal) is quite interesting, there's some good idea lurking in there.

_Cycles of Time_ is weird - yes, "repeating" universes or better, universes connected by singularities, is a valid idea and the diagrams he pioneered point in that direction, but he got things very wrong when he thought he could get data from a "previous" universe out of the CMB (or something). Theoretical physicists can be quite naive about data science and statistics...

But his consciousness stuff is just atrociously stupid. I am amazed that he is still sticking to his guns. I am guessing it is a combination of Nobelitis ("all my ideas must be genius") and the crackpot's wager ("if I am shown to have been right all along in 300 years' time, I will be eternally famous, bad though the odds may be")


It's funny though - any _one_ of the things he's legitimately known for would be an amazing career high for most of us, but no, he has to be the guy who solved consciousness, QM/GR, and the fundamental questions of cosmology. Sure, nobody is going to tell him knock it off, Rodge, and he wouldn't listen anyway, but it does add to the general ideas that academics are crazy and science should be defunded.

[DrWhom]

A bit of gossip from the maths community in the UK: apparently a loo paper company brought out TP with Penrose tilings on it, and he sued them.

[charbelbejjani]

Very good summary. I feel that few academics really understand Penrose's line of thought and how he views the world.

You only missed a small detail that he thinks collapse of the wave function is objective and happens when gravity interacts with QM in a non-computational way. He believes that these objective non-computational collapses in microtubules are the mechanisms from which proto-consciousness arises.

[fk]

First of all. I love your content dude.

So much of what brains do is outside logical operators. They arc. Something (a random electrical event) spontaneous and unique happens all the time whilst nature and subjectivity embedded in it, unfold. This doesn't mean that some processes cannot be modelled. Neurons have sheaths, so important things that need to happen all the time, happen. Building a brain from an arcing model is alchemy, not science. I dont want to sound like a hard nose, because im not at all. I just dont know it would be possible to get to an understanding of conscuousness as a goal, where you wpuld have to concede to having to solder billions of faulty electrical appliances to eachother without using an alchemical method. Do you build a reliably gated working circuit first, realise it is not addequate and then take a knife to it over innumerable experiments until you have consciousness?

[Toji]

So, im a 15 yo prodigy, ive completed my undergrad studies and currently studying QM by R shankar, after completion i want to go into QFT, can u suggest me some books for that and also what should i do after that, and like i want to become a theoretical physicist, and also want to contribute in GUT for string theory, what should i do after studying qft?

[MitchellPorter]

I posted a link to Nanopoulos et al, who used noncritical string theory to imitate Hameroff and Penrose's model, and it was deleted?