4 ms·

I understood that part of Penrose's argument to run as follows (which I got from his book the emperor's new mind, I admit I actually skimmed the interview). 1.

I understood that part of Penrose's argument to run as follows (which I got from his book the emperor's new mind, I admit I actually skimmed the interview). 1. Assume for contradiction that human reasoning is formally describable, as an algorithm or as a logical structure. 2. As a result, the incompleteness theorem produces a sentence that is true in that formal system but which human reasoning cannot detect (by virtue of being described by this formal system). 3. But the proof of the incompleteness theorem shows that this sentence is true, and it was produced by a human, a contradiction. I don't necessarily disagree with the conclusion (I'm kinda agnostic at this point), I just think that this particular argument doesn't hold water.

moi2388 2y ago
Point 3 doesn’t make sense to me. Just because Godels incompleteness theorem exists, does not mean you cannot prove this theorem itself. It has in fact already been proven in theorem provers, so this completely undermines Penrose’s point
soulofmischief 2y ago
Yeah if anything in this universe is undecidable, it's gotta be the conscious thought and behavior of a sufficiently complex brain. Even if a full system analysis reveals patterns that can be used for short-term predictions, you're still only looking at inputs and outputs, and run into the system identification problem. Two brains could produce the same measurable output while still experiencing wildly different internal phenomenon and qualia. For example, how would I know that my blue is your blue, even if we both answer blue and our visual cortex exhibits similar firing patterns?
- raindeer2 2y ago
  If you and I had the same exact input and outputs then why would we have different experiences? Seems very unlikely to me. A better way of thinking about qualia is like embeddings in a neural network. Every time you run the training from a random initialization you will get different resulting embedding, but given the same training data all embeddings will all essentially be equivalent under rotation. I.e., your internal representation of blue might be very different from mine in an absolute sense but our relation between the representation of different colors will be roughly the same.
  - soulofmischief 2y ago
    > If you and I had the same exact input and outputs then why would we have different experiences? Seems very unlikely to me. The point is that you may not be able to prove that for a sufficiently connected system. > A better way of thinking about qualia is like embeddings in a neural network. I don't think this is a good analogy. Even if two brains might have the same input and output pairs, you don't necessarily know that they had the same experiences. You also don't know that initial epigenetic and prenatal conditions haven't deviated from the two brains. It would be extremely hard to control for this in a lab, and certainly you won't encounter such similarities in the wild. > your internal representation of blue might be very different from mine in an absolute sense but our relation between the representation of different colors will be roughly the same. I think you misunderstand qualia, as this is the exact crux of the argument. Just because we can agree to relational congruencies doesn't mean we have the same individual internal experiences. And we can't just handwave this away as "not important" or "roughly the same". In any case, your argument is self-defeating, as any deviation in internal experience validates my original claim. Further reading on qualia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia
  - northern-lights 2y ago
    > If you and I had the same exact input and outputs then why would we have different experiences? Seems very unlikely to me. On the contrary, I would say it's quite unlikely that two brains with the same input and outputs will ever have the same experiences in deriving the output from the input. But neither of us (nor anyone in the world) know how human brains work, so it is probably not useful debating about this.
GoblinSlayer 2y ago
That's religion? True here means human believes in it. But not provable. It's religion.

moi2388 2y ago

Point 3 doesn’t make sense to me. Just because Godels incompleteness theorem exists, does not mean you cannot prove this theorem itself. It has in fact already been proven in theorem provers, so this completely undermines Penrose’s point

soulofmischief 2y ago

Yeah if anything in this universe is undecidable, it's gotta be the conscious thought and behavior of a sufficiently complex brain. Even if a full system analysis reveals patterns that can be used for short-term predictions, you're still only looking at inputs and outputs, and run into the system identification problem. Two brains could produce the same measurable output while still experiencing wildly different internal phenomenon and qualia. For example, how would I know that my blue is your blue, even if we both answer blue and our visual cortex exhibits similar firing patterns?

raindeer2 2y ago
If you and I had the same exact input and outputs then why would we have different experiences? Seems very unlikely to me. A better way of thinking about qualia is like embeddings in a neural network. Every time you run the training from a random initialization you will get different resulting embedding, but given the same training data all embeddings will all essentially be equivalent under rotation. I.e., your internal representation of blue might be very different from mine in an absolute sense but our relation between the representation of different colors will be roughly the same.
- soulofmischief 2y ago
  > If you and I had the same exact input and outputs then why would we have different experiences? Seems very unlikely to me. The point is that you may not be able to prove that for a sufficiently connected system. > A better way of thinking about qualia is like embeddings in a neural network. I don't think this is a good analogy. Even if two brains might have the same input and output pairs, you don't necessarily know that they had the same experiences. You also don't know that initial epigenetic and prenatal conditions haven't deviated from the two brains. It would be extremely hard to control for this in a lab, and certainly you won't encounter such similarities in the wild. > your internal representation of blue might be very different from mine in an absolute sense but our relation between the representation of different colors will be roughly the same. I think you misunderstand qualia, as this is the exact crux of the argument. Just because we can agree to relational congruencies doesn't mean we have the same individual internal experiences. And we can't just handwave this away as "not important" or "roughly the same". In any case, your argument is self-defeating, as any deviation in internal experience validates my original claim. Further reading on qualia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia
- northern-lights 2y ago
  > If you and I had the same exact input and outputs then why would we have different experiences? Seems very unlikely to me. On the contrary, I would say it's quite unlikely that two brains with the same input and outputs will ever have the same experiences in deriving the output from the input. But neither of us (nor anyone in the world) know how human brains work, so it is probably not useful debating about this.

GoblinSlayer 2y ago

That's religion? True here means human believes in it. But not provable. It's religion.