3 ms·
I had the opportunity to do that, once, after Penrose was invited to give a talk to google's quantum team. He talked about objective orchestrated reduction and
by Strilanc 6y ago
I had the opportunity to do that, once, after Penrose was invited to give a talk to google's quantum team. He talked about objective orchestrated reduction and consciousness.
The talk was interesting because I completely disagreed with it, but the disagreement was only in the starting assumptions. Penrose thinks humans do uncomputable things; I don't. If you ignored that difference, he was making reasonable arguments. Even more so, he was obviously thinking about things clearly and quantitatively. For example, someone on the team had worked out whether or not orchestrated reduction, if it existed, would prevent error corrected quantum computers from working. They wanted to show the result to Penrose. But before they'd shown him their answer, he knew off-hand that the rough order of magnitudes of the effect sizes meant it shouldn't be an issue.
Anyways I sat next to him at dinner afterwards. There was lots of conversation around, so it wasn't like there was one topic. I remember trying to debate whether humans were doing uncomputable things or not, but nothing really came of it.