Sir Roger Penrose - "Consciousness and the foundations of physics”
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Sir Roger Penrose - “Consciousness and the Foundations of Physics”, delivered at the Ian Ramsey Centre - Humane Philosophy Project 2014-2015 Seminar. Chaired by Ralph Weir, Alister McGrath and Mikolaj Slawkowski-Rode. The introduction of quantum mechanics in the early 20th Century led many physicists to question the “Newtonian” type of picture of an objective deterministic physical reality that had been previously regarded as an essential background to a fully scientific picture of the world. Quantum measurement, as described in standard theory however, requires a fundamental indeterminism, and issues such as Bell non-locality cause basic difficulties with a picture of objective reality that is consistent with the principles of relativity. Accordingly, many philosophers of science have felt driven to viewpoints according to which “reality” itself takes on subjective qualities, seemingly dependent upon the experiences of conscious beings. My own position is an essentially opposite one, and I argue that conscious experience itself arises from a particular objective feature of physical law. This, however, must go beyond our current understanding of the laws of quantum processes and their relation to macroscopic phenomena. I argue that this objective feature has to do with implications of Einstein’s general theory of relativity and, moreover, must lie beyond the scope of a fully computational universe. SIR ROGER PENROSE OM FRS is a renowned mathematical physicist, mathematician and philosopher of science. He is the Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the Mathematical Institute of the University of Oxford, as well as an Emeritus Fellow of Wadham College. He is known for his work in mathematical physics, especially his contributions to general relativity and cosmology. He has received numerous prizes and awards, including the 1988 Wolf Prize for physics, which he shared with Stephen Hawking for their contribution to our understanding of the Universe. In 1972 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1972. He was knighted for services to science in 1994 and appointed to the Order of Merit in 2000. He also holds honorary doctorate degrees from many distinguished universities including Warsaw, Leuven, York and Bath.
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That impertinent idiot at the back who gets hung up on pattern matching should have been thrown out
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Bless Roger Penrose.
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I am conscious. Are you?
I am unable to justify whatever is your answer. To me, consciousness is divided into two parts - I and the rest. The part, I, make my decisions and the rest (R, including you and all dead things) is automatic (i.e not decided by me). I don't think that it is possible to find an objective answer to who or what else other than me is conscious as consciousness is subjective. Mr Penrose may prove his idea about the mechanism for collapsing the wave function but it is still too early to say that mechanism gives rise to consciousness.
I can't rule out that R or any part of it may be conscious but R must be part of my subconsciousness or else I will not be able to perceive R in my mind. -
Roger is 85.... hurry up with that Nobel prize!
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Yes, please over and over again show me him pointing towards a screen rather than showing me what's actually on the screen. I sure like to see his tie much more than what he's talking about.
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Some of us are entirely TOO amazed with computers, and the predictions are highly optimistic concerning strong AI. It'll never happen with the computers we have now. These computers are fundamentally different than consciousness. Just the fact that we engineer computers to operate by insulating circuitry prevents these computers from creating a field; whereas with consciousness, studies suggests that it exists within a field, since it certainly doesn't exist in just the neurons. Two ideas have been put forward that are getting close to understanding consciousness - quantum theory of consciousness and electromagnetic theory of consciousness. Both are in the early stages but so far they're all I can see as pointing in the right direction - and both suggest a field. A field makes sense. A field allows for chaos where a computer as we know it does not. This is why something naively put forward like Kurzweil's idea of "uploading mind" just doesn't make sense when based on computation as we know it - until we understand MORE than just the physical brains (even using nanobots to map the brain, like Kurzweil suggests), we will get nowhere, simply because everyone knows mind is not brain (research has proven this, otherwise it would all be a very straightforward thing to recreate mind). When we understand mind, we will not only create mind and upload and download mind, but we'll travel stars effortlessly, by transmission (and probably metadata containing genetic information for nano-instantiation of a physical presense). It's all very scifi right now. Kurzweil makes his case for humanity getting to this stage within 200 years. That's ridiculous, even considering exponential increase of rate of development. We can only develop based on what we have and know now - and many assume that what we have and know now are sufficient, whereas it hasn't been proven that what we have and know now really IS sufficient, simply because not enough resources are being put towards studies of consciousness. Studies of consciousness have no readily apparent use to military or corporate interest (of course), and so... It's like reliance on energy paradigms that are more than 100 years old - no one's really funding research into Helium-3 fusion or moon mining because fat greedy pigs in power would lose a lot of money in oil and coal. Nuclear power is based on fission, which is dirty as hell, but it's still being pursued, with plans to build yet more nuclear plants. It isn't that fusion hasn't worked, it's only that EFFICIENT fusion hasn't been achieved. Sad. Luckily, quantum computing has interested government, because some very smart chap framed the idea around the fact that a quantum computer could easily crack ANY current encryption with ease, haha. But who knows, maybe quantum computing will offer viable ways to pursue strong AI.
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it is impossible, imho, to investigate for trying understanding the phenomenon of consciousness (as a property of highly developed living organisms = animate matter) without putting forward the development of the concept of an observer.
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The part of the very end was amazing. The room laughed in agreement of the truth about consciousness. You see, we all know you can't make a machine conscious. It's those who sit around all day wondering can you who get lost.
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but good on sir roger, he doesn't shy away from the questions we all pay nasa fortunes to answer
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not no more bruv
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I couldn't follow him - he was all over the place,
but the scaling up of quantum experimentation
will tell us in the future as to whether or not the
quantum behavior ends at a certain point and
the classical, Newtonian behavior takes over.
All should be dictated by quantum interaction.
But then again, I am of the Lanza school of a
living universe composed of consciousness,
which is the creative ability of self awareness. -
17:26- galois, godel, or girdle?
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WORLDS SMARTEST COMMENT SECTION
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Sir Roger Penrose - without doubt one of our greatest national treasures. He uses really outdated technology when presenting his lectures with his crude acetates and slides but there is nothing outdated about the astonishing clarity he brings to the topics in which he takes a deep interest. :)
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Started this video then got doing some other things so I had to start it all over again. LOL
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I think the whole issue can be formulated in two questions, no need to invoke uncomputability:
1. If the brain is just a neural network, how can humans be so good at the deductive reasoning considering that neural nets are inductive reasoning machines (i.e., can learn patterns and reproduce them, but seem unable to operate with logical inference).
2. If the deductive reasoning capabilities of the brain is a product of Darwinian selection, at what point of the evolution it became advantageous and how it could have evolved so rapidly? Extra points: what's the evolutionary justification for humans to enjoy solving artificial deductive problems? (i.e., making up puzzles, playing chess, etc.)
Anyway, I don't agree with Penrose on everything but he makes much more sense to me than the singularity cult that became too annoying after the deep learning advances... -
"Infinities" are neither "numbers" nor "things" - they are not destinations, they are journeys. Function over Form - QED.
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If you want to understand infinity take LSD and look at rogers tie.
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He's spot on, in that a computer can never gain a consciousness, as being conscious is part of something that the computer, no matter how fast or well programmed, can never be. A processor, nor a motherboard, will never hold the two sides of the whole, the human minds duality; the consciousness and the unconsciousness. The latter is the only place that a computer can be similar, where memory, etc, is stored, and can be recollected from. The recollected memory is the same as a programs script, running until finished.
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