Roger Penrose - What is Consciousness?

Roger,

what

is it about Consciousness that attracted you as a mathematical physicist to enter an area you hadn't been in before? Well, I think my interest in this area arose long before my father had a great interest in these topics and eh. He became interested professionally, he was interested in the inheritance of mental illness, but we used to have discussions about whether

consciousness

could be a computational activity. It was the kind of thing that people were interested in, actually, secretly at one stage in my life. I secretly wanted to be a neurosurgeon, so I opened up the brain and saw how it worked, which never worked, but it was later when I still thought maybe we were all computers or something.

I had an interest. On Girdle's theorem, this was when I was a mathematics student at the University of London and I went to Cambridge later as a postgraduate student and there I attended courses on various things that I found interesting, such as the Bondi course on cosmology and the Derx course on quantum. mechanics and another course that was taught by a lecturer called Steen who talked about the girdle theorem and tilt machines and all this and I think it was at that stage that I formed my opinion that there has to be something going on when we understand things particularly mathematics, which is

what

it's all about, uh, which can't be done by computers, understanding what you're doing is something different from computing, uh, I had no idea what it could be, but from D's lectures I learned this paradox between the measurement process and the rules of quantum mechanics which was the central element of

consciousness

that made you reject computational theory.

I think it was the sash argument and Steen's lectures made it completely clear and the things he put into it. a way that's not the way people often do it, people usually, at least in the popular version, say, oh well, Girdle's theorem shows that there are things in mathematics that can't be proven , they see unprovable statements and I didn't like the idea of ​​that, but Steen made it is completely clear that well provable by the means that you see now do you trust the means of proof? If you trust the means of proof then you can transcend it now what is happening there? you see?

It means that our understanding allows us to go beyond any rules. As proof that you trust yourself, I think I formulated my ideas then that what we do when we consciously understand something is not computational, but that was really a result of the lectures and mathematical logic that I attended, so that's the fundamental point. that Consciousness is not computational so then you have to give another explanation. I think that's where the dra lectures that I felt like you needed came in somewhere where there was a gap in our understanding now I don't know how long it took me to formulate this I think this belief emerged gradually over many years and I didn't think much about it. it.

I simply formed the opinion that what is involved in conscious thought cannot be fully described by the physics we know and where the main big gap is. In the physics that we know well is in quantum mechanics, the type of contradiction between the continuous evolution that is given by the Schrodinger equation and the discrete, probabilistic thing that happens when you make a measurement, the two things fit together very well, but They are inconsistent. each other, yes, and the argument against that is that you have two Mysteries and you try to solve two Mysteries as a simultaneous equation and Magic works fine.

I know that people accuse me of a Mystery. A mystery, why don't they do it? What do you see, no, it's clearly logical, uh, whether you take the logic too far, I don't know, there has to be something outside of the physical and it has to be something that is important to something about the operation. about things we don't know, you know, we don't even now know if the universe is spatially open or closed, what that has to do with it, we don't know, the rules are: Define the masses of the particles individually, there are a lot of mysteries there.

That's not directly relevant, but the only thing that might be directly relevant is this huge gap in our understanding that has to do with the two procedures of quantum mechanics being inconsistent with each other, so some other theory is needed to fill that gap and that's the only place I can think of and I'm still the only place I can think of where they have a big enough gap that could be filled with some new theory where computation doesn't rule, you see, everything others we have. I know you can, at least as close as you want, simulate in a calculation, yes, what the physical world is doing according to physical theory, but the only place we don't know is in this state reduction, the big, the missing. in quantum mechanics and how that relates to phenomenology how we feel when we are conscious, well, not really, I mean, yes, in the sense that there are many aspects of Consciousness that it doesn't touch you see happiness uh you know pain uh appreciation of beauty well, to a certain point, but none of these things are pretty, they are very direct, but the only thing that touches is the understanding, the quality of understanding something now that the quality seems I agree with the arguments of faja and else that quality is not a computational process you understand go back you understand what is happening and what that means I don't know, but whatever it means, it is something that requires your awareness.

It just doesn't make sense to me to say of an entity that it understands something if it isn't even aware of it. Just the use of words implies that it implies consciousness. That is a small ingredient of what consciousness is. however, in my opinion, it's enough to start with, it doesn't answer all the other questions, you know what it implies when you perceive the color red or something, uh, certainly those things are not addressed in this, but at least if you can find a. and that's one thing is understanding and in this very limited area of ​​understanding mathematics just because that's when you can make arguments, there's a lot of things that apply to understanding and you can't make rigorous arguments about it, but here's one in which We can make rigorous arguments and those rigorous arguments seem quite clear to me, they tell us that our understanding is not a computational process.