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If you assert that consciousness has no physical cause, then that's all you can say about it. You're skyhooking. you can take the wrong turn Penrose took and p
by ArkyBeagle 10y ago
If you assert that consciousness has no physical cause, then that's all you can say about it. You're skyhooking.
you can take the wrong turn Penrose took and posit that it's due to quantum effects, as a sort of middle ground.
My way of looking at it is that we use "consciousness" as a default bucket for things we don't have instrumentation to measure, or otherwise have a functioning predictive model for.
- mcguire 10y agoI've always wondered if anyone has pointed out to Penrose that asserting all behavior is random is not better than the alternatives, philosophically speaking.
- ArkyBeagle 10y agoQuantum isn't particularly random in the information theoretic sense of the word "random". There's a pretty healthy set of rules already: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_information https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_information The reason it's bad, using a Dennet frame of mind, is that it's a sort of left-handed "skyhook" - throwing "quantum" in the resolve the longstanding divide between Mechanists and those who believe in a Prime Mover or deity. It's an Ex Deux Machina of sorts. I can sympathize with Penrose; his entire career was about measuring the information transforms of things like black holes, so why not apply the same basic recipe to consciousness? It's still an interesting idea, but it's not, SFAIK, testable.