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Comment by ajuc | Hacker News Reader

Penrose basically thinks that biological neurons do QM magic and therefore classical computers can't do what they do.

People got very upset when chemistry proved that we are made of the same thing as "unalive" things like rocks. You can see the same now that we proved the same for intelligence.

We describe QM as magic informally, but it isn’t of course.

A classical computer is only exploits a little bit of physics, so I don’t think it is obvious that we’ll ever create a classical computer that matches (however we pick the metric to match, efficiency is harder than raw compute) human intelligence (however we define that). But a machine intelligence could be designed using all of the physics we understand including quantum mechanics.

His argument was based on the fact we don't know how it works, so the "magic" part of my description is warranted :)

Isn’t Penrose adding some extra though, when he says the brain does some sort of “uncomputable” process?

Incidentally his shots in dark have proven true. Microtubules do seem to rely on some QM tricks.

http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2024/05/brain-really-uses-q...

Right, but I think it's the spurious connections to intelligence/consciousness that people object to. You could replace most instances of "consciousness" in the emperor's new mind with a different word and the arguments would be just as strong.

So do tunnel diodes, but microwave oscillators are understandable.

Yeah, the funny thing is - transistors depend on QM as well. But it's "magic" when it's in our brains.

Then that's an argument for pancognition. I.e. that everything is on some level cognitive, even if it's total cognitive capacity is remain immobile (rock).

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