[ExI] few bits per second

[Damien Broderick]

On 6/26/2010 6:40 PM, Ross Evans wrote:

[Broderick:]
 >>    You might well be right, but how do you know this? You're a
 >>    neuroscientist, I take it? Or perhaps a quantum specialist on the
 >>    order of Roger Penrose?

> Is being either a requisite to dismiss a theory on the basis of lack of
> evidence? The consensus in the scientific community is that the idea is
> bunkum.

It's tricky. Obviously Penrose and his scientist supporters, for 
example, are not *without evidence*--they have the same evidence 
everyone else does, and happen to be paying special attention to certain 
aspects of it.

Besides, are their suggestions theories or hypotheses? I'd have thought 
the latter.

Is appealing to Penrose's expertise, over (what I assume is, for lack of 
any evidence offered otherwise) your thirdhand magazine gossip, nothing 
better than the fallacy of appeal to authority? But of course you are 
appealing to the alleged authority of a larger group, "the scientific 
community." This can only be that small part of the community of 
scientists actually engaged in neuroscience and related work, plus some 
informed philosophers trying to make meta-sense of their findings.

But then we run into the partial blindness of experts with a stake in 
their own programs; the consensus in the medical community for decades 
if not centuries was that ulcers are caused by stress and the notion 
that they were usually caused by infection was dismissed as bunkum. 
Granted, the key to accepting that idea was evidence gathered by 
dangerous self-experiments, but it's possible that solving consciousness 
might be a little bit more difficult. People make it that much more 
difficult to solve by shouting "bunkum" in a crowded room.

Damien Broderick
[not a Penrosian]