Consciousness is Not a Computation (Roger Penrose) | AI Podcast Clips

I'm trying to say that whatever consciousness is it's not a computation yes it's not a physical process which can be described by computation but it nevertheless could be so one of the interesting models that you've proposed as the orchestrated objective reduction yeah that's going from there you say so I say I have no idea so I wrote this book through my scientific career I thought you know when I'm retired I have enough time to write a sort of popular ish book which I will explain my ideas and puzzles but I like beautiful things about physics and mathematics and this puzzle about computability in consciousness and so on and in the process of writing this book well I thought I'd do it when I retired I didn't actually I would didn't wait that long because there was a radio discussion between edward fredkin and marvin minsky and they were talking about what computers could do and they were answering and entering a big room it imagined entering this big room with the other end of the room two computers were talking to each other and as you walk up to the computers they will have communicated to each other more ideas concepts things than the entire human race had ever commute that yes so I thought well know where you're coming from but I just don't believe you there's something missing that's it's not that so I thought well I should write my book and so I did it was a roughly the same time Stephen Hawking this writing his brief history of time and Hades at some point the book you're talking was the emperor's new mind that's right and both are and incredible books the brief history of time an emperor's new mind yes I think white interesting because he got he told me he'd got some Carl Sagan I think to rise her forward good gosh what am I gonna do I'm not gonna get anywhere unless I get somebody so I know Martin gardener so we do it so he did and it is a very nice forward so that's that's an incredible book and some of the same people you mentioned Ed Franken which I guess of expert systems Fame and Minsky of course people know in the eye world but they represent the artificial intelligence that do hope and dream that a eyes intelligences am I thinking well you know I see where they're coming from and from exercise rectus oh yeah you're right but that's not my perspective so I thought I had to say it and as I was writing my book you see I thought well I don't really know anything about neurophysiology what am i doing writing this book so I certainly reading up about neurophysiology and I'm rate had nothing I'm trying to find out how it is that nerve signals could possibly preserve quantum coherence and all I read is that the second electrical signals which go along the nerves create some effects through the brain there's no chance you can isolate it so this is hopeless so I come to the end of the book and I'm more or less give up and just think of something which I didn't believe in this maybe this is the way around it but no and then you say I thought well maybe this book will at least stimulate young people to do science or something and I got all these letters from old people instead he's the only people who could had time to read my book so I mean except for Stuart Hameroff except for Stuart Hameroff you don't have a rough road to me and he said I think you're missing something you don't know about microtubules do you didn't put it quite like that but that was more or less it and he said this is what you really need to consider so I thought oh my god yes that's a much more promising structure so I mean fundamentally you were searching for the source of a non computable source of consciousness within the human brain yeah in the biology and so what are mark if I may ask what are microtubules well you see I I was ignorant in what address I never came across them and in in the books I looked at perhaps I only read rather superficially which is true but I didn't know about microtubules Stuart I think one of the things here was impressed him about when you see pictures of mitosis that's a cell dividing and you see all the chromosomes and the chromosomes get their gate or gate line and then they get pulled apart and so that as the cell divides the half the chromosomes go you know how their web is divided into the two paths and they go two different ways and what is it that's pulling them apart well those are these little things called microtubules and so he starts to get interested in them and he formed the view well he was his day job or night job of where every call it is to put people to sleep except he doesn't like calling to sleep because it's different general anesthetics in a reversible way so you want to make sure that they don't experience the pain that would otherwise be something that they feel and consciousness is turned off for a while and then can be turned back on again so it's crucial that you can turn it off and turn it on and what do you do when you're doing that what do general anesthetic gases do and see he formed the view that it's the microtubules that they affect and the details of why he formed that view is not what the girl isn't clear to me but there but there's an interesting story he keeps talking about but I've found this very exciting because I thought these structures these little tubes which inhabit pretty well ourselves it's not just neurons apart from red blood cell red blood cells they inhabit pretty well all the other cells in the body but they're not all the same kind you'll get different kinds of microtubules and the ones that excited me the most and this is may still not be totally clear but they're ones that excited me most were the ones that the only ones that I knew but at the time because they were there very very symmetrical structures and I had reason to believe that these very symmetrical structures would be much better at preserving a quantum state quantum coherence preserving the thing without you just need to because to preserve certain degrees of freedom without them leaking into the environment once they leak into the environment your loss so you ought to preserve these quantum states at a level which the state reduction process comes in and that's where I think the NAM computability comes in and it's the measurement process in quantum mechanics what's going on so something about the measurement process what's going on something about the structure or the microtubules yeah your intuition says maybe there's something here maybe this kind of structure allows for the the mystery the there was a better chance yes it just struck me that partly it was the symmetry because there is a feature of symmetry you can produce perfect preserve quantum coherence much better with symmetrical structures they said there is a good reason for that and that impressed me a lot I didn't know the difference between the a lattice and B lattice at that time which could be important now that could in medicine this year which isn't talked about much but that's some in some sense details we're good to take a step back just to say these people are not familiar so this this this was called the orchestrated objective reduction idea or orko R which is a biological philosophy of mind the postulates that consciousness originates at the quantum level inside neuron so that has to do with your search for where where is it coming from so that's counter to the notion that consciousness might arise from the computation performed by the synapses yes the key point he sometimes people say it's because it's quantum mechanical it's not just that see it's it more outrageous than that you see this is one reason I think we're so far off from it because we don't even know the physics right you see it's not just quantum mechanics people say oh we know quantum systems and biological structures know we'll use starting to see that some basic biological systems does depend on quantum I mean look you the first place all of chemistry is quantum mechanics people got used to that so they don't count that so I said let's not come on Hank chemistry we sort of got the hang of that I think but you have quantum effects which are not just chemical in photosynthesis and this is one of the striking things in the last several years that photosynthesis seems to be a basically quantum process which is not simply create chemical it's using quantum mechanics in a very basic way so you can start saying oh well with photosynthesis is based on quantum mechanics why not behave you have neurons and things like that maybe there's something which is a bit like photosynthesis in that respect but what I'm saying is even more outrageous than that because those things are talking about conventional quantum mechanics now my argument says that conventional quantum mechanics if you're just following the Schrodinger equation that's still computable so you've got to go beyond that so you've got to go to where quantum mechanics goes wrong in a certain sense you have to be a little bit careful about that because the way people do quantum mechanics is a sort of mixture of two different processes one of them is the Schrodinger equation which is a an equation my Schrodinger wrote down and it tells you how the system the state of a system evolves it evolves according to this equation completely deterministic but it involves into ridiculous situations and this was much frightening it was very much pointing out with his cat he said you follow my equation that's Schrodinger's equation and you could say that you have two cat a cat was just dead and alive at the same time that would be the evolution of the Schrodinger equation would lead to a state which is the cat being dead and alive at the same time and he's more or less saying this is an absurdity people nod I say oh well Schrodinger said you couldn't have a cat with deadly it's not that you see he was saying this is an absurdity there's something missing that the reduction of the state or the collapse of the wavefunction or whatever it is it's something which is has to be understood it's not following the Schrodinger equation it's not the way we conventionally do quantum mechanics there's something more than that and it's easy to quote Authority here because Einstein at least three of the greatest physicists of 20th century who were very fundamental in developing quantum mechanics Einstein one of them Schrodinger another Dirac another you have to look carefully it directs writing because he didn't tend to say this out loud too much because he was very cautious about what he said you find the right place and you cease he says quantum mechanics is a provisional theory we need something which explains the collapse of a wavefunction we need to go beyond the theory we have now I happen to be one of the kinds of people there are many there is a whole group of people they're all considered to be a bit you know bit Mavericks who believe that quantum mechanics needs to be modified there's a small minority of those people which were really a minority who think that the way in which it's modified has to be with gravity and there is an even smaller minority of those people who think it's a particular way that I think it is you see so so those are the quantum gravity folks for what's well you see quantum gravity is already not this because when you say quantum gravity what you really mean is quantum mechanics applied to a gravitational theory so you say let's take this wonderful formalism of quantum mechanics and make gravity fit into it so that is what quantum gravity is meant to be now I'm saying you got to be more even-handed that gravity affects the structure of quantum mechanics too it's not just you quantize gravity you've got to gravity as quantum mechanics and it's it's a two-way thing but then when you even get started so that you're saying and we have to figure out totally new ideas entirely no yes it's you're stuck we don't have a theory that's the trouble so this is a big problem if you say okay well what so they're I don't know so we're maybe in the very early days sort of it is in the very early days and they but just making this point yes well you see Stuart Hameroff tends to be open road says there's got to be a reduction of the state and so so let's use it the trouble is Penrose doesn't say that Penrose says well I think that no no we have no experiments as yet which shows that yes there are experiments which are being thought through and which I'm hoping will be performed there is an experiment which is being developed by Jeremy Stowe who is a I've known for a long time who shares his time between Leiden in the Netherlands and Santa Barbara in the US and he's been working on an experiment which could perhaps demonstrate that quantum mechanics as we now understand it if you don't bring in the gravitational effects it has to be modified and and then there's also experiments that are underway that kind of look at the microtubule side of things to see if there's in the biology you could see something like that could you briefly mention it because that's a really sort of one of the only experimental attempts in the very early days of even yeah about I think there's there's a very serious area here which is what Stuart Hameroff is doing and I think it's very important one of the few places that you can really get a bit of a handle on what consciousness is is what turns it off and when you're thinking about general anesthetics it's very specific these things turn consciousness off what the hell do they do well Stuart and a number of people who work with him and others happen to believe that the general anesthetics directly affect microtubules and there is some evidence for this I don't know how strong it is and how watertight the cases but I think there is some evidence pointing in that kind of direction it's not just an ordinary chemical process there's something quite different about it and one of the main candidates is that the anesthetic gases do affect directly microtubules and how strong that evidence is I wouldn't be in a position to say but I think there is fairly impressive evidence and the point is the experiments are being undertaken with yes I mean that is experimental it's a very clear direction where you can think of experiments which could indicate whether or not it's really microtubules which the anaesthetic gas is directly affect that's really exciting one of the sad things is as far as I'm from my outside perspective it's not many people are working on this so there's a very Michael Stewart even it feels like there's very few people are carrying the flag forward on this I think it's it's not many in the sense it's a minority but it's not zero anymore you see when I originally was serious you know we were just just us and a few few of our friends they weren't many people think so but it's grown into into it one of the main viewpoints yeah there might be about four or five or six different views that which people hold and it's one of them so it's considered as one of the possible lines of thinking yes you describe physics theories as falling into one of three categories the superb the useful or the tentative I like those words it's a beautiful categorization do you think we'll ever have a superb theory of intelligence and of consciousness we might we're a long way from it I don't think we're even whether in the tentative scale I mean it's uh you don't think we've even entered the realm of tentative probably no I think yeah that's raised you know what do you see the circle is so controversial we don't have a clear view which which is accepted by majority I mean you say yeah people most views are computational in one form or another they think it's some but it's not very clear because even the the IIT people who think think of them as computational but I've heard them saying they know consciousness is supposed to be not computation I said well if it's not coming in what the hell is it what's good what's going on but physical processes are going on which are that what does it mean for something to be computational then so is um well there has to be a process which is it's very curious the way the history has developed in quantum mechanics because very early on people thought there was something new with consciousness but it was almost the other way around you see you have to say the Schrodinger equations says all these different alternatives happen all at once and then when is it that only one of them happens where one of the views which was quite commonly held by a few distinguished quantum physicists this when a conscious being looks at the system what becomes aware of it and at that point it becomes one of the other that's a row where consciousness is somehow actively reducing the state my view is almost the exact opposite of that it's the state reduces itself in some way which some non computational way which we don't understand we don't have a proper theory of and that is a building block of what consciousness is so consciousness it's the other way around it depends on that choice which nature makes all the time when the state becomes one of the other rather than the superposition of one and the other and when that happens there is what we're saying now an element of proto consciousness takes place proto consciousness is roughly speaking the building block out of which actual consciousness is constructed so you have these proto conscious elements which are when the state decides to won't do one thing or the other and that's the thing which when organized together that's the oh our part in orko our but the ork part that's the the Oh our part at least once can see where when driving it as a theory because it's the quantum choice of going this way or that way but the ork part which is the orchestration of this is much more mystery Arius and how does the brain somehow orchestrate all these individual our processes into a genuine genuine genuine conscious experience and and it might be something that's beautifully simple but we're completely in the dark about yeah I think at the moment it's that's the thing you know we happily put the word or walk down there to say orchestrated that's even more unclear what that really means just like the word material orchestrated yeah it's who knows yes and we've been dancing a little bit between the word intelligence or understanding in consciousness do you kind of see those as sitting in the same space of mystery as yes you see I tend to say you have understanding and intelligence and awareness and somehow understanding is in the middle of it you see it's I like to say could you say of an entity that is actually intelligent if it doesn't have the quality of understanding maybe I'm using terms I don't even know how to define but who cares really there's somewhat poetic so as I somehow understand them yes things that they're not mathematical in nature yes you see as a mathematician I don't know how to define any of them but at least I can point to the connections so the idea is intelligence is something which I believe needs understanding otherwise you wouldn't say for any intelligence an understanding needs awareness otherwise you wouldn't really say it's understanding you say of an entity they understand something and it's unless it's really aware of it then our normal usage so there's a three sort of awareness understanding and intelligence and I just tend to concentrate on understanding because that's where I can say something okay that's the kernel theorem things like that but they what does it mean to be perceived the color blue or something yes that's much more difficult question I mean this is the same if I see a color blue and you see it if you're something with this this condition wants to call them or were you assign sound - yeah yeah that's right you get colors and sounds mixed up and and that sort of thing I mean an interesting subject term here but from the physics perspective from the fundamentals perspective we don't I think we're way off pretty much understanding what's going on there you

Channel: Lex Fridman

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Keywords: roger penrose, artificial intelligence, ai, ai podcast, artificial intelligence podcast, lex clips, lex fridman, lex podcast, lex mit, lex ai, mit ai, ai podcast clips, ai clips

Id: hXgqik6HXc0

Length: 22min 59sec (1379 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 04 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/ArgentStonecutter]

We actually know a lot about the feeling of “red” because we know the mechanisms involved quite a long way into the brain. And the whole process of measuring frequencies doesn’t actually happen. It’s got no explanatory power, it’s just muddying the waters. Which is what you’re doing.

[u/robdogcronin]

I think this is a fairly 'unpopular' opinion among neuroscientists.

[u/ArgentStonecutter]

Penrose is a spiritualist. This is religion, not science.

[u/ArgentStonecutter]

Your definition of consciousness is neither interesting or useful, because there is no reason to assume that the magical features you attribute to consciousness even exist. Consciousness can be nothing more complex than a system modelling itself in the world sufficiently closely that it treats the modelled self as real. The “inner experience” is a side effect. I can’t prove it is but you can’t prove it isn’t, and you are demanding I accept that as an axiom.

Lots of people have this religious belief that consciousness must be more than that. But it’s purely religious. Being smart doesn’t mean you can’t be religious.

I’m not much of a singularitarian. Just ask the “serious” singularitarians here. PantsGrenades is always ragging on me about my poking holes in their mysticism. Singularitarianism invokes all kinds of magical thinking too.

[u/BofC2020]

How can matter in all its forms come together after many eons and form biologically living organisms whom are conscious without us biological beings being able to yet find how or why consciousness exists?

There IS a creator.