[ExI] few bits per second

[Ben Goertzel]

Hmmm...

There is no real evidence that quantum physical phenomena underlie human
consciousness, but IMO it's a credible hypothesis

OTOH Penrose goes further, and suggests that **quantum gravity** phenomena,
inexplicable by current quantum physics, underlie human consciousness and
render human intelligent problem-solving fundamentally uncomputable...

The latter is a lot more of a stretch than the "mere" quantum physics /
consciousness connection....  The latter really does reek of wishful
thinking, because none of the current theories of quantum gravity (including
Penrose's twistor theory) *are* uncomputable...

-- Ben G

On Sat, Jun 26, 2010 at 8:03 PM, Damien Broderick <thespike at satx.rr.com>wrote:

> 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]
>



-- 
Ben Goertzel, PhD
CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC
CTO, Genescient Corp
Vice Chairman, Humanity+
Advisor, Singularity University and Singularity Institute
External Research Professor, Xiamen University, China
ben at goertzel.org

"
“When nothing seems to help, I go look at a stonecutter hammering away at
his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it.
Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was
not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before.”
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