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Article 7419 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: weemba@sagi.wistar.upenn.edu (Matthew P Wiener)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Making sense out of Penrose
Message-ID: <95076@netnews.upenn.edu>
Date: 28 Oct 92 15:13:21 GMT
References: <1992Oct15.171636.10178@oracorp.com> <SMAILL.92Oct17175821@hope.aisb.ed.ac.uk> <1992Oct26.200146.967@awdprime.austin.ibm.com>
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In-reply-to: zazen@hwperform.austin.ibm.com (East Coker)

In article <1992Oct26.200146.967@awdprime.austin.ibm.com>, zazen@hwperform (East Coker) writes:
>In particular, I would like to hear Penrose's comments on the discussion
>has transpired recently on this group. Especially regarding the quantum
>gravitation effects on consciouness that he has proposed.

The only way I know of to make sense of Penrose is as follows, as direct
belief in quantum gravity consciousness is completely unsupportable, and
will remain so for a long long time.  One of the perplexing problems in
QM is the role of the observer.  The world is quantum, but what you see
is a classical world.  Making sense of this has been so perplexing that
otherwise serious physicists have accepted the notion that consciousness
itself is responsible for this quantum/classical discrepancy.  The debate
is not helped by the usual wavefunction collapse terminology, which makes
the notion seem like mind-over-matter, which it isn't.  The resolution of
the debate will probably be something much more mundane, but....

Let's just say Penrose's book assumes that terminal "but" for now.  No
matter how much you hear some people--even physicists who ought to know
better--loudly claim otherwise, that "but" has remained around for half
a century, and it's not going away anytime soon.  One expectation, maybe
even a reasonable one, is that the current debate is premature.  As long
as QM and GR remain at odds with each other, both are wrong.  Without a
unified QG to work inside of, we're seeing a bizarre aspect of something
that is just mind-numbingly simple if we only knew better.  In particular,
the various interpretations of QM will no longer be interinterpretable as
they are now, and one of them (the "but") will be the clear winner, and
with the rigorous context of QG to work inside, a physical explanation
for consciousness will stand out.

That is, there are no quantum gravity black holes running around inside
our brains, bouncing in and out of existence, making us think.  Rather,
there's a more subtle framework that our neurons are exploiting, and we
in our less than infinite wisdom, are not going to figure this one out
without first going to the extreme of solving QG.
-- 
-Matthew P Wiener (weemba@sagi.wistar.upenn.edu)


