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Comment by codebolt | Hacker News Reader

Such a joy to see Sir Roger Penrose awarded with this honor. One of my favorite contemporary intellectuals.

If anyone hasn't seen it, I recommend his recent appearance on the Lex Fridman podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orMtwOz6Db0

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Yes so exciting to see this. His book the Road to Reality is revolutionary to me and I have not even finished it (still digesting). Every time I hear him speak it seems I learn some new perspective on the universe that fundamentally changes my thinking, really inspiring person.

Now we’ve got to listen to his Orch OR theory about how microtubules are quantum computers of consciousness! as a biologist I’m so excited for this theory to catch on and refine our notions of neuronal information processing beyond synaptic theory.

I somehow always had the impression that Roger Penrose was a numerical computation guy (Moore-Penrose pseudoinverse).

I did not realize he had this vast of scope of a contributions in physics. Certainly quite impressive.

He has also written a few books.

https://www.amazon.com/Roger-Penrose/e/B000AQ045A%3Fref=dbs_...

Has anyone read his writings on consciousness? When I was young and still believed in free will I imagined that consciousness used quantum mechanics as a way to generate free will. I later learned that Penrose had theories that sounded similar. But have not read about it.

Here is an interesting discussion of this work by physicists: https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2756

I've read both. The first was the most impactful to me personally. The way he uses Gödels theorems to argue against the computability of consciousness is actually quite ingenious and it's presented in such a straightforward way that I could easily grasp it from first principles. I also find the criticisms I've seen against it to be knee-jerkish and flimsy.

Orch OR seems like a shot in the dark, and while certainly an interesting thought experiment I'd like to see more evidence before I buy in to it.

There have been many responses to the Gödelean argument that miss the point, but I have been persuaded that it is vulnerable on the basis of its assumption that a logical system must be sound if it is to be a candidate for capturing a human's reasoning powers. Minsky, among others, pointed out that our ability to believe falsehoods, and to hold contradictory beliefs, opens the possibility, if not the expectation, that human reasoning is not sound.

IIRC be wrote about that in The Emperor's New Mind a formative book for me (even though I was still at highschool when I read it) but one I haven't really returned to now I've a more academic understanding of the subject matter. To-do!

Another list: https://www.worldcat.org/identities/lccn-n82139094/

penrose tilings is a contributions to pure mathematics, too

Veritasium YouTube channel has a good video on Penrose tiles that my kids just watched, https://youtu.be/48sCx-wBs34 .

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