seems to be one of the deepest and intriguing mysteries on the frontier of science today, and there isn't much more than speculation on the subject.
Penrose offers an original and exciting I found it to be : approach,
I've recently started an undergrad engineering degree, and a good deal of this book is way over my head, But I do feel that Penrose has done a good job in conveying the gist of things, and can be sensitive to readers' different backgrounds sometimes suggesting an uninitiated reader to skim a certain part.
I would say that prerequisite knowledge for the book would be prior familiarity with at least concepts of quantum physics ,computation, and Godel's theorem.
That aside, I find the subject fascinating, and could very well identify with the "mysteries" Penrose details in the final chapters, Relating to consciousness as just another soon to be mastered field as treated by the socalled "strong AI" proponents seems presumptuous to me, and I find myself more identifiying with Penrose, who treats the subject with a lot more gravity.
I'm no authority, but I would definitely recommend taking in other views though, from the strong AI perspective Kurzweil maybe and Godel, Escher Bach by Hofstadter.
This book is great feat of human logic, It gives in a logical analysis why the human brain can't be a mere computational machine like computers, The author, Sir Roger Penrose, who is an acclaimed mathematical physicist, asserts on the basis of Godel's incompleteness theorems, that our brain's perception is beyond the constraints dictated by these theorems which are true for the mathematics and the algorithms operating in computers.
We wouldn't be able to grasp the mathematical concepts and to formalize new concepts if our brains and consciousness would be confined by those theorems' constraints.
The author asserts that our brains operate by rules which require consideration of new Physics, particularly the Quantum Physics, in order to explain the rise of consciousness out of the brain.
He gives practical examples by using AI Artificial Intelligence to show why brains can't be just some extended AI, Then he gives other practical examples from brain cells' basic structures to show how brains might use the mysterious principles of Quantum Physics to function and to having the abilities which surpass immensely the most advanced digital AI and that any digital AI wouldn't ever possess them in principle.
The drawback of this book is that it contains extensive mathematicalphilosophy discussions centered around Godel's incompleteness theorems, using many symbols in those discussions, The author himself advises most of the readers to omit such sections, But even besides it, IMO, the author's language is not always so friendly for the average reader in his explanations and conclusions about those discussions above.
this book took me months to finish because i was stupid enough to do the emperors new mind rereading not long before i started this one and as the author notes, there is great overlap.
i, being as stuck in my ways as i am, couldnt relax into skipping the parts that are "the same" which meant that i was mindnumbingly bored for the first part so i put it away.
but i needed to get to the new parts for my thesis so i picked it up again last week and pushed through until the fun started.
and it was worth it,
it is definitely much better than enm if youre interested in the mind itself, enm is way more technical and detailed and you wont find as much talk about some otherwise very cool topics recursive sets, curvatures, phase space, and neuroscientific quirks but it is structured more comprehensibly to explain: enm is a field guide to physics and math with a few rather undefined thoughts about the nature of the mind that spring up at the start and the end, while shadows is more of a direct tour of causeeffect or argumentconclusion for penroses still cursory, tbh theory of the mind.
despite sir
rogers best efforts of keeping the scope of the topic managable, there are still chapters that make it hard to see the forest despite the trees.
but this is, for the most part, still more due to the nature of the topic breadth, interconnectedness, complexity and the shortcomings of the reader than the presentation itself.
theres loads of examples and illustrations to drive the points home too, albeit sometimes the examples are still more confusing than probably ought be the dodecahedron part, omg, . .
one can really see that dr, hameroff put in significant work to collaborate with the sir roger, because not only is there extensive talk about microtubules but also clathrins, ordered water, boseeinstein condensates, anaesthetics and all of the upsides and doubts of it all.
its very nice and reassuring to see that they considered so many things that ive come across in research up to now "humble" brag, objective reduction is also developed and explained in much greater detail for which we are all thankful, i think, amazing what five years of thought can do!
i honestly believe that the times review "one of the most important works of the second half of the twetieth century" will only prove to be more indisputable in the future.
didnt even bother earmarking this one cause there are little in pencil on the sides of almost every page, now all i gotta do is write the damn thing,
bit of a blog this review innit till next time I probably would have given Penrose' book aStar review were it not for the fact that a good third of the book was WAY over my head due to the heavy mathematics involved.
However, I did grasp the basic concepts and arguments of the book, soStars will be OK,
Warning, though this book has some heavy math in it, You can skim most of that and still understand what this man is trying to get across, though, so don't let this warning scare you off.
The entire argument can be reduced to "I presume that biological minds didn't evolve a a timeout mechanism, hence they are not computational", Algorithms usually have a stop function and even if they didn't, they can possibly run forever, hence the entirety of the premise falls apart,
And it takes soooo loooong to get there, I mean people that are not interested in the topic won't read it anyway and for people that are interested, there is no need to explain every detail throughpages.
And although I think that consciousness if fundamentally quantum effect there is nothing surprising about that, Everything is quantum in essence, Also we are close to quantum computation and that will basically close the circle,
Universe is computational. Minds are computational.
The argument is simple, There are mathematical problems that can't be solved using algorithms noncomputable problems, If you device an algorithm to solve that kind of problems, and let a computer run the algorithm, it would never stop, Yet the human mathematician is able to solve that kind of problems, Computational neuroscience and Artificial Intelligence treats the brain as a computer: either there is a neuronal signal or not, very much similar to theandscheme.
But that algorithmic representation can't be truly faithful to what's really going on in the mathematician's brain, There must be a noncomputable ingredient,
Penrose argues then, that there's a deeper level of information processing in the brain, deeper than neural networks, Microtubules is the best candidate for that, Think of a unicellular organism, like an amoeba, How does it know where to go and what to do It has no nervous system, not even a single neuron, Yet it does what it does, by the means of these cellular automata, One more thing: it appears that things at that molecular level behave according to the strange laws of quantum mechanics, providing the noncomputable ingredient,
This is an extraordinary approach to the problem of consciousness, and Penrose is a humble man although in one of his interviews he pointed out to the interviewer that he should be called "Sir" Roger Penrose! who doesn't claim to have solved the mystery of consciousness.
He clearly states that the argument is strong at least for the quality of understanding, And that other qualities of consciousness like feeling, attention, imagination can't be simply explained by algorithms only, or be regarded as phenomena emerging out of complexity the cerebellum is as complex as the cerebrum yet it's totally automated and unconscious.
./
The book is divided into two parts, in the first part he explains aboutpossibilities for robots to develop consciousness,
A that the robot is aware
B that the robot seems conscious but is not
C consciousness is not computable
D consciousness is outside the laws of physics.
In the first part, he shows us why consciousness is not computable through the unanswered problems of Turing machines and Godel's theorem, In the second part, he is in charge of demonstrating how consciousness can be noncomputable, lying on quantum principles, And he tells us about the brain structure, the microtubules and the possibility that all of them are producing quantum coherence together, . . Quantum coherence is the state where the particles are not entangled as in superconductivity and the states "yes" and "not" are separated,
He tells us a little about how it is necessary to reform the theories of current quantum physics, so that they adapt to some nonlinear theory of time, but perhaps circular.
Where the future affects the past, . .
It ends with a beautiful dialogue about the three worlds physical, perceptive and mental, and the role that consciousness plays in all of them.
In general the book is very good and easy to understand theoretically, however in some parts it becomes tedious due to the equations presented and the problems that are somewhat complex to imagine visually such as the dodecahedron.
Not counting that, I think the explanation is good and leads to interesting conclusions, .