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The Penrose Fallacy: 1. We don't understand Quantum Mechanics 2. We don't understand the mind 3. Therefore QM explains the mind Or as Steve Harnad once said

The Penrose Fallacy: 1. We don't understand Quantum Mechanics 2. We don't understand the mind 3. Therefore QM explains the mind Or as Steve Harnad once said, he takes all the embarrassments and failings of one field and marries them with another.

kordless 9y ago
The connecting of disparate ideas is irrational in the individual. It's only when a group of people temporarily accept that those concepts may make sense that things get done. Given consciousness is directly responsible for giving us an individual's consciousness, and that consciousness (either by group or individual) must try to understand itself using the effect it is trying to describe, the concepts may NOT make sense when getting things done. This may be why philosophy is frequently taken as quackery, and non-scientific. ;) My HN profile has carried my thoughts on Penrose and Hammeroff's theories for some time now. Good to see it posted here and debated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reduction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reducti...
drostie 9y ago
Downvoted because Penrose does not actually commit this fallacy, therefore naming it after him is something of a cheap shot, an excuse to not actually engage with his ideas.
- inputcoffee 9y ago
  I would downvote you if I could because you make a claim without backing it up. I am not the only one who has this interpretation of him. I certainly arrived upon it independently but so did many (more credible) giants in the field. As far as I can tell, he doesn't have an argument that consciousness stems from QM beyond the rather elusive nature of both. So if you think that is wrong, by all means, explain the connection you think he elucidates.
  - drostie 9y ago
    Your frustration in your first sentence I would equate to a general human frustration that we all feel when we see our own sins reflected in others -- you don't back up your claim so you get mad at me for not backing up my claim. I could in turn make a really good case that the burden of proof is not on the person who says "he doesn't make that argument" to prove that he doesn't, but on the person who says "he makes that argument" to prove that he does. And then we can go back and forth in negativity, I suppose. In an attempt to avert that spiral of world-suck, let me attempt to instead meet your request head-on. Penrose is not saying what you say he's saying, and would not be able to fill up two books with your argument. Let's talk hacker for a second. What you're saying is that Penrose is basically saying "well I don't understand this bug in my computer program, and I don't understand the kernel in my computer, so therefore a kernel bug is causing this bug in my computer program." You are going to be predisposed to see any reduction of a bug towards the kernel as being evidence that yes, your characterization of the argument is correct and the argument is indeed laughable. This is understandable if someone just told you that hypothesis off-the-cuff, which I surmise is how you've probably encountered Penrose. (That is, I take the fact that you're laughing as evidence that you've not read both The Emperor's New Mind and Shadows of the Mind.) The alternative however, is that someone has (a) a high-level statement of "this shouldn't be happening", and (b) knows that the only way that such things can happen, barring things like the MMU misbehaving, is a kernel bug, and (c) has been attempting to trace down the code to the fundamental syscalls, and found that the thing-that-shouldn't-be-happening is indeed bracketed around one syscall in particular which does not seem to be doing what the docs say it should do. And if a hacker has attempted all of this, I mean, they might still be wrong: but their argument is no longer something of the form "I don't understand the kernel and I don't understand this bug, therefore the kernel caused this bug." It is something more sophisticated than that, and you're doing a disservice by laughing at them. One and a half of Penrose's books are ultimately about why the computationalist/algorithmist thesis of brain function seems deeply incomplete -- that a hallmark of some certain examples of reasoning appears to be deeply nonalgorithmic. (For example The Emperor's New Mind supplements his usual Godel argument with arguments that if brain plasticity comes from local neural plasticity then it is unlikely to have a great generality, but by a clever analogy if it does have a great generality then not only does that mesh with an idea of global plasticity, but it is very unlikely to be algorithmic. The one and a half books are basically full of little digs that, seen together, do seriously undermine faith in the thesis.) This is essentially the "bug" above. His favorite example is that we are capable of proving to our own mathematical understanding that our mathematical-understanding-algorithm contains true sentences which we will never be able to prove; if this algorithm exists then it is able to prove something that it will never be able to prove, which seems like a straightforward contradiction. But there are one and a half pop-sci books that he's written building up some other problems with this thesis in a way that even if you don't start off with knowledge of the relevant physics/comp-sci/whatever, you can hopefully understand it enough to appreciate the problem. He follows these up with a principled dive into what's actually underlying these "bugs". That is, he discards ideas about souls and takes it seriously that our reasoning is realized in our brain, and takes seriously that this is a biochemical system, and evaluates whether the noncomputable phenomena that he is "debugging" can come from chaos or randomness or the like. He is able to rule most of these out with auxiliary considerations, and so tries to get one level closer to the hardware: the biochemsitry is well-modeled, we know, by physical chemistry; there are likely no new fundamental interactions or whatever to be found in biochemistry. Looking into the physical chemistry level he finds that it can be somewhat cleanly divided into two parts: quantum and classical. Technically, it's all quantum: but you can handle a lot more with various classical rules of thumb, and this has basically all been done before him so he can just steal those results:the classical part of physical chemistry and probably even the vast majority of the quantum part of physical chemistry are algorithmic, it is known that quantum computers don't do other things than what computers do; they just might do many things more quickly. There exists only one part of the quantum part of physical chemistry which is not. Unfortunately, he doesn't have access to the source code, nor docs for what nature does--so he actually constructs physical-chemistry models that could hypothetically do the sort of buggy things that he's seeing at the top-level that he has carefully ruled out at the other levels of explanation. And this is all to say: as you can hopefully now see, these books contain a lot more than simply "we don't understand X, we don't understand Y, therefore Y causes X." Namely there is an actual understanding for example that X is realized in a system which has to be modeled with Y, and which has some features that can only come from certain corresponding features in Y, which we actually do understand very well. There has been a solid amount of good effort to push down that causal chain until one is left at these syscalls and then saying "something is fishy about those." And his argument might indeed be wrong, there are many little parts where maybe he's wrong about how chaos works and how it could cause a similar bug, just as our programmer above might be wrong about whether two processes are properly synchronized via locks or whatever -- but it's no longer this laughable thing of "ha, he doesn't understand X and Y so he thinks Y causes X!" that you're trying to say.
- gdavisson 9y ago
  It's not very far from his argument. The article quotes him as saying “We need a major revolution in our understanding of the physical world in order to accommodate consciousness. The most likely place, if we’re not going to go outside physics altogether, is in this big unknown—namely, making sense of quantum mechanics.”
  - drostie 9y ago
    The word "this" is key, and the reasoning why it's this unknown, and not, say, our unknowns about the arrow of time or whatever -- see also my comments below. If you're going to stay in the realm of normal conventional physics and try to explain the phenomena that he's trying to explain, those conventional physics steer you towards this particular part of physics as a crucial step in understanding how we're able to accomplish certain forms of reasoning in general.
CuriouslyC 9y ago
Except that quantum indeterminacy provides a reasonable mechanism for free will, and entanglement provides a reasonable mechanism for the fact that a bunch of disconnected neurons produce one mind. In fact, in both cases they are the only possible mechanisms that don't involve completely new physics.
- inputcoffee 9y ago
  I would love to see a survey of the group of people who find Penrose compelling. Anecdotally, I find the people drawn to his view are largely physicists. And the people who scorn him are largely "cognitive scientists". (I am closer to the second group than the former). What you find to be "reasonable mechanisms", I find to be completely unreasonable. No, I don't think entanglement is a "reasonable mechanism" for "the fact that a bunch of disconnected neurons produce one mind." I don't even know why one would think that quantum entanglement is even vaguely relevant to the "problem", and I think it has something to do with a misunderstanding of the problem. Do you think that there is a problem of mind in the form of "a bunch of disconnected neurons produce one mind"?
  - SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
    You don't actually give any reasons. Why do you find it unreasonable that entanglement would be involved with integrating signals from disparate regions or several neurons? The problem is how we integrate the signals from many regions in to whatever is generating the single perception (or perhaps several parallel perceptions -- I don't know that there aren't other experiences coincident with mine, just that I have access to one of them). Unless you're postulating that a single neuron at a time is responsible for my subjective experience, then you do need to explain how several neurons are generating a single signal. My experience with cognitive scientists is that they simply punt on the problem, completely failing to address how the signal is amalgamated in to a single stream of experience even as they talk about what regions contribute features of it.
    - inputcoffee 9y ago
      Because that isn't the problem. It is not a correct or good statement of a problem. Let me put it this way, suppose there was a mechanism, call it X, that explains to your satisfaction how many different neurons can "integrate the signals from many regions". Does that explain to you why physical neurons create a subjective experience? Would you now consider the "problem of consciousness" to be solved? Leaving "consciousness" aside, there is no issue at all of course. We have a straightforward computational theory of how different neurons can integrate their output and produce a computation. The problem is that this idea of "integrating" signals is not clearly laid out. If it is not the computational problem, then what sort of problem is it? Koch and Crick have also proposed "a mechanism" for something like the co-ordination of various neurons to explain visual awareness. A frequency at which all the neurons "cohere." (Koch is also a real genius, by the way. https://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/ps/access/SCBCFD.pdf https://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/ps/access/SCBCFD.pdf ) Again, the problem with their proposal is that it is not really a "mechanism." Suppose all the neurons that recognize a face happen to be vibrating at 40 hz, Does that "explain" "consiousness?" I lean towards the philosophers. Read one good critique by Fodor, and you realize that the questions are poorly formed.
sgt101 9y ago
Up voted for the reference to Steve Harnad what a lovely man :)

kordless 9y ago

The connecting of disparate ideas is irrational in the individual. It's only when a group of people temporarily accept that those concepts may make sense that things get done. Given consciousness is directly responsible for giving us an individual's consciousness, and that consciousness (either by group or individual) must try to understand itself using the effect it is trying to describe, the concepts may NOT make sense when getting things done. This may be why philosophy is frequently taken as quackery, and non-scientific. ;) My HN profile has carried my thoughts on Penrose and Hammeroff's theories for some time now. Good to see it posted here and debated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reduction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reducti...

drostie 9y ago

Downvoted because Penrose does not actually commit this fallacy, therefore naming it after him is something of a cheap shot, an excuse to not actually engage with his ideas.

inputcoffee 9y ago
I would downvote you if I could because you make a claim without backing it up. I am not the only one who has this interpretation of him. I certainly arrived upon it independently but so did many (more credible) giants in the field. As far as I can tell, he doesn't have an argument that consciousness stems from QM beyond the rather elusive nature of both. So if you think that is wrong, by all means, explain the connection you think he elucidates.
- drostie 9y ago
  Your frustration in your first sentence I would equate to a general human frustration that we all feel when we see our own sins reflected in others -- you don't back up your claim so you get mad at me for not backing up my claim. I could in turn make a really good case that the burden of proof is not on the person who says "he doesn't make that argument" to prove that he doesn't, but on the person who says "he makes that argument" to prove that he does. And then we can go back and forth in negativity, I suppose. In an attempt to avert that spiral of world-suck, let me attempt to instead meet your request head-on. Penrose is not saying what you say he's saying, and would not be able to fill up two books with your argument. Let's talk hacker for a second. What you're saying is that Penrose is basically saying "well I don't understand this bug in my computer program, and I don't understand the kernel in my computer, so therefore a kernel bug is causing this bug in my computer program." You are going to be predisposed to see any reduction of a bug towards the kernel as being evidence that yes, your characterization of the argument is correct and the argument is indeed laughable. This is understandable if someone just told you that hypothesis off-the-cuff, which I surmise is how you've probably encountered Penrose. (That is, I take the fact that you're laughing as evidence that you've not read both The Emperor's New Mind and Shadows of the Mind.) The alternative however, is that someone has (a) a high-level statement of "this shouldn't be happening", and (b) knows that the only way that such things can happen, barring things like the MMU misbehaving, is a kernel bug, and (c) has been attempting to trace down the code to the fundamental syscalls, and found that the thing-that-shouldn't-be-happening is indeed bracketed around one syscall in particular which does not seem to be doing what the docs say it should do. And if a hacker has attempted all of this, I mean, they might still be wrong: but their argument is no longer something of the form "I don't understand the kernel and I don't understand this bug, therefore the kernel caused this bug." It is something more sophisticated than that, and you're doing a disservice by laughing at them. One and a half of Penrose's books are ultimately about why the computationalist/algorithmist thesis of brain function seems deeply incomplete -- that a hallmark of some certain examples of reasoning appears to be deeply nonalgorithmic. (For example The Emperor's New Mind supplements his usual Godel argument with arguments that if brain plasticity comes from local neural plasticity then it is unlikely to have a great generality, but by a clever analogy if it does have a great generality then not only does that mesh with an idea of global plasticity, but it is very unlikely to be algorithmic. The one and a half books are basically full of little digs that, seen together, do seriously undermine faith in the thesis.) This is essentially the "bug" above. His favorite example is that we are capable of proving to our own mathematical understanding that our mathematical-understanding-algorithm contains true sentences which we will never be able to prove; if this algorithm exists then it is able to prove something that it will never be able to prove, which seems like a straightforward contradiction. But there are one and a half pop-sci books that he's written building up some other problems with this thesis in a way that even if you don't start off with knowledge of the relevant physics/comp-sci/whatever, you can hopefully understand it enough to appreciate the problem. He follows these up with a principled dive into what's actually underlying these "bugs". That is, he discards ideas about souls and takes it seriously that our reasoning is realized in our brain, and takes seriously that this is a biochemical system, and evaluates whether the noncomputable phenomena that he is "debugging" can come from chaos or randomness or the like. He is able to rule most of these out with auxiliary considerations, and so tries to get one level closer to the hardware: the biochemsitry is well-modeled, we know, by physical chemistry; there are likely no new fundamental interactions or whatever to be found in biochemistry. Looking into the physical chemistry level he finds that it can be somewhat cleanly divided into two parts: quantum and classical. Technically, it's all quantum: but you can handle a lot more with various classical rules of thumb, and this has basically all been done before him so he can just steal those results:the classical part of physical chemistry and probably even the vast majority of the quantum part of physical chemistry are algorithmic, it is known that quantum computers don't do other things than what computers do; they just might do many things more quickly. There exists only one part of the quantum part of physical chemistry which is not. Unfortunately, he doesn't have access to the source code, nor docs for what nature does--so he actually constructs physical-chemistry models that could hypothetically do the sort of buggy things that he's seeing at the top-level that he has carefully ruled out at the other levels of explanation. And this is all to say: as you can hopefully now see, these books contain a lot more than simply "we don't understand X, we don't understand Y, therefore Y causes X." Namely there is an actual understanding for example that X is realized in a system which has to be modeled with Y, and which has some features that can only come from certain corresponding features in Y, which we actually do understand very well. There has been a solid amount of good effort to push down that causal chain until one is left at these syscalls and then saying "something is fishy about those." And his argument might indeed be wrong, there are many little parts where maybe he's wrong about how chaos works and how it could cause a similar bug, just as our programmer above might be wrong about whether two processes are properly synchronized via locks or whatever -- but it's no longer this laughable thing of "ha, he doesn't understand X and Y so he thinks Y causes X!" that you're trying to say.
gdavisson 9y ago
It's not very far from his argument. The article quotes him as saying “We need a major revolution in our understanding of the physical world in order to accommodate consciousness. The most likely place, if we’re not going to go outside physics altogether, is in this big unknown—namely, making sense of quantum mechanics.”
- drostie 9y ago
  The word "this" is key, and the reasoning why it's this unknown, and not, say, our unknowns about the arrow of time or whatever -- see also my comments below. If you're going to stay in the realm of normal conventional physics and try to explain the phenomena that he's trying to explain, those conventional physics steer you towards this particular part of physics as a crucial step in understanding how we're able to accomplish certain forms of reasoning in general.

CuriouslyC 9y ago

Except that quantum indeterminacy provides a reasonable mechanism for free will, and entanglement provides a reasonable mechanism for the fact that a bunch of disconnected neurons produce one mind. In fact, in both cases they are the only possible mechanisms that don't involve completely new physics.

inputcoffee 9y ago
I would love to see a survey of the group of people who find Penrose compelling. Anecdotally, I find the people drawn to his view are largely physicists. And the people who scorn him are largely "cognitive scientists". (I am closer to the second group than the former). What you find to be "reasonable mechanisms", I find to be completely unreasonable. No, I don't think entanglement is a "reasonable mechanism" for "the fact that a bunch of disconnected neurons produce one mind." I don't even know why one would think that quantum entanglement is even vaguely relevant to the "problem", and I think it has something to do with a misunderstanding of the problem. Do you think that there is a problem of mind in the form of "a bunch of disconnected neurons produce one mind"?
- SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
  You don't actually give any reasons. Why do you find it unreasonable that entanglement would be involved with integrating signals from disparate regions or several neurons? The problem is how we integrate the signals from many regions in to whatever is generating the single perception (or perhaps several parallel perceptions -- I don't know that there aren't other experiences coincident with mine, just that I have access to one of them). Unless you're postulating that a single neuron at a time is responsible for my subjective experience, then you do need to explain how several neurons are generating a single signal. My experience with cognitive scientists is that they simply punt on the problem, completely failing to address how the signal is amalgamated in to a single stream of experience even as they talk about what regions contribute features of it.
  - inputcoffee 9y ago
    Because that isn't the problem. It is not a correct or good statement of a problem. Let me put it this way, suppose there was a mechanism, call it X, that explains to your satisfaction how many different neurons can "integrate the signals from many regions". Does that explain to you why physical neurons create a subjective experience? Would you now consider the "problem of consciousness" to be solved? Leaving "consciousness" aside, there is no issue at all of course. We have a straightforward computational theory of how different neurons can integrate their output and produce a computation. The problem is that this idea of "integrating" signals is not clearly laid out. If it is not the computational problem, then what sort of problem is it? Koch and Crick have also proposed "a mechanism" for something like the co-ordination of various neurons to explain visual awareness. A frequency at which all the neurons "cohere." (Koch is also a real genius, by the way. https://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/ps/access/SCBCFD.pdf https://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/ps/access/SCBCFD.pdf ) Again, the problem with their proposal is that it is not really a "mechanism." Suppose all the neurons that recognize a face happen to be vibrating at 40 hz, Does that "explain" "consiousness?" I lean towards the philosophers. Read one good critique by Fodor, and you realize that the questions are poorly formed.

sgt101 9y ago

Up voted for the reference to Steve Harnad what a lovely man :)