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Except that quantum indeterminacy provides a reasonable mechanism for free will, and entanglement provides a reasonable mechanism for the fact that a bunch of d

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 10y 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 10y 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 10y 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.
    - SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
      It proposes a way by which those neurons can create subjective experience, yes. Namely, that the medium they're creating the signal in is fundamentally experiential and perturbations in it are fundamentally experiences of some variety. There are lots of philosophical reasons to think that this is the case for some aspect of reality (or perhaps fields in general, even). This would give us a science of experience and allow us to categorize and create new experiential beings. That's a goal that many of us have. Now, for various reasons, we might suppose a medium we're already aware of (or mediums in some combination -- as is the position of the materialist). Then the question becomes entirely about the integration mechanism, as that's the only piece of the puzzle we don't know. So if you're a materialist, the integration of brain patterns in to a signal which corresponds to subjective experience is the question of creating new 'souls' (in the sense of beings who experience), and also of categorizing what exactly has a 'soul' (in the sense of inner experience). The problem is how the computational structure which produces our behavior couples to our experience of it, which is a consistent, evolving perturbation in something, even if just in the sense of being a quasiparticle formed of the constituent parts interacting. (Though, likely, we're missing parts of the computational story -- I don't think most serious scientists would argue that.) I think you just don't like the question, but it's pretty clearly formed, at least as far as big research directions ever are.
- CuriouslyC 10y ago
  I don't agree with Penrose's hypothesis, I just happen to agree that strange quantum behavior is related to the character of our consciousness. Other than that my views are completely different. There is definitely a "binding" problem. Beyond the question of why the state of many disconnected neurons (or to go one level down, molecules) are subjectively experienced as a single consciousness, you also have the issue of why other neurons nearby are not subjectively experienced. After all, your consciousness doesn't even extend to your entire brain.
HONEST_ANNIE 10y ago
Give description of 'free will' so that it can't be replaced with 'chaotic', 'non deterministic' or 'random'. So far nobody has been able to do that.
- CuriouslyC 10y ago
  Give me proof of the existence of true randomness without referencing wavefunction realization. I think free will is the ability to make conscious choices. These choices are guided by a chaotic, but ultimately deterministic preference function, which itself can be modified by conscious choice. You could argue that the deterministic preference function is a negation of free will, but I think the separation in the causal chain between condition and response is significant. There are lots of cases where there is no experience of choice mediating the transition from condition to response, so I think that feeling is indicative of something meaningful.
  - HONEST_ANNIE 10y ago
    >but I think the separation in the causal chain between condition and response is significant. Term 'free will' seems to be thought terminating cliche. It seems poetic and deeply meaningful but descriptions as yours say it's just 'deterministic action interrupted with coin flips'. From the subjective point of view it does not matter if action is deterministic or arbitrary coin flip. There is no 'freedom' in free will.
  - marcosdumay 10y ago
    If your bar for consciousness emulation is quantum randomness, I'm glad to tell you that computers are great on getting this one too. Yes, it's outside the scope of pure Turing machines, but that is of little relevance.
mannykannot 10y ago
Penrose himself does not seem to be entirely convinced of that: "Is Penrose making the case for free will? “Not quite, though at this stage, it looks like it,” he said. “It does look like these choices would be random. But free will, is that random?”
- prmph 10y ago
  Free will can be both random and non random at the same time. For example, a recursive infinity of antecedents. Like I said before, we just don't have the concepts to model free will right now, so we should not dismiss it as impossible. Imagine trying to explain to someone living 1000 years ago things like quantum entanglement and superposition. Or Gödel's theorem and the Halting problem. These concepts challenge our intuitive senses, and yet we have to grapple with them because they are supported by real evidence. Now imagine a thousand years from now, new phenomena or understandings will generate concepts that can model free will that is both non-random and non-deterministic.
  - kmicklas 10y ago
    > Now imagine a thousand years from now, new phenomena or understandings will generate concepts that can model free will that is both non-random and non-deterministic. This abstractly makes sense, but I think the free will supporters still have the burden of proof of, right now, explaining at least at a very high level what free will would be if not random/deterministic. Otherwise we must lend credibility to all kinds of crazy theories.

inputcoffee 10y 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 10y 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 10y 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.
  - SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
    It proposes a way by which those neurons can create subjective experience, yes. Namely, that the medium they're creating the signal in is fundamentally experiential and perturbations in it are fundamentally experiences of some variety. There are lots of philosophical reasons to think that this is the case for some aspect of reality (or perhaps fields in general, even). This would give us a science of experience and allow us to categorize and create new experiential beings. That's a goal that many of us have. Now, for various reasons, we might suppose a medium we're already aware of (or mediums in some combination -- as is the position of the materialist). Then the question becomes entirely about the integration mechanism, as that's the only piece of the puzzle we don't know. So if you're a materialist, the integration of brain patterns in to a signal which corresponds to subjective experience is the question of creating new 'souls' (in the sense of beings who experience), and also of categorizing what exactly has a 'soul' (in the sense of inner experience). The problem is how the computational structure which produces our behavior couples to our experience of it, which is a consistent, evolving perturbation in something, even if just in the sense of being a quasiparticle formed of the constituent parts interacting. (Though, likely, we're missing parts of the computational story -- I don't think most serious scientists would argue that.) I think you just don't like the question, but it's pretty clearly formed, at least as far as big research directions ever are.
CuriouslyC 10y ago
I don't agree with Penrose's hypothesis, I just happen to agree that strange quantum behavior is related to the character of our consciousness. Other than that my views are completely different. There is definitely a "binding" problem. Beyond the question of why the state of many disconnected neurons (or to go one level down, molecules) are subjectively experienced as a single consciousness, you also have the issue of why other neurons nearby are not subjectively experienced. After all, your consciousness doesn't even extend to your entire brain.

HONEST_ANNIE 10y ago

Give description of 'free will' so that it can't be replaced with 'chaotic', 'non deterministic' or 'random'. So far nobody has been able to do that.

CuriouslyC 10y ago
Give me proof of the existence of true randomness without referencing wavefunction realization. I think free will is the ability to make conscious choices. These choices are guided by a chaotic, but ultimately deterministic preference function, which itself can be modified by conscious choice. You could argue that the deterministic preference function is a negation of free will, but I think the separation in the causal chain between condition and response is significant. There are lots of cases where there is no experience of choice mediating the transition from condition to response, so I think that feeling is indicative of something meaningful.
- HONEST_ANNIE 10y ago
  >but I think the separation in the causal chain between condition and response is significant. Term 'free will' seems to be thought terminating cliche. It seems poetic and deeply meaningful but descriptions as yours say it's just 'deterministic action interrupted with coin flips'. From the subjective point of view it does not matter if action is deterministic or arbitrary coin flip. There is no 'freedom' in free will.
- marcosdumay 10y ago
  If your bar for consciousness emulation is quantum randomness, I'm glad to tell you that computers are great on getting this one too. Yes, it's outside the scope of pure Turing machines, but that is of little relevance.

mannykannot 10y ago

Penrose himself does not seem to be entirely convinced of that: "Is Penrose making the case for free will? “Not quite, though at this stage, it looks like it,” he said. “It does look like these choices would be random. But free will, is that random?”

prmph 10y ago
Free will can be both random and non random at the same time. For example, a recursive infinity of antecedents. Like I said before, we just don't have the concepts to model free will right now, so we should not dismiss it as impossible. Imagine trying to explain to someone living 1000 years ago things like quantum entanglement and superposition. Or Gödel's theorem and the Halting problem. These concepts challenge our intuitive senses, and yet we have to grapple with them because they are supported by real evidence. Now imagine a thousand years from now, new phenomena or understandings will generate concepts that can model free will that is both non-random and non-deterministic.
- kmicklas 10y ago
  > Now imagine a thousand years from now, new phenomena or understandings will generate concepts that can model free will that is both non-random and non-deterministic. This abstractly makes sense, but I think the free will supporters still have the burden of proof of, right now, explaining at least at a very high level what free will would be if not random/deterministic. Otherwise we must lend credibility to all kinds of crazy theories.