Tag: Penrose

Kalam the Incorrigible as a Moral Good

Mark DavisLeave a comment

I’ve previously complained that the Kalam Cosmological Argument is drivel, but a recent video reminded me that intellectual sophistication can arise from confronting drivel, because it helps expose more people to the tenuous, changing, and incomplete journey of modern science and philosophical interpretation/translation. I knew I was largely in alignment with modern science when I wrote that particular post (and others), but the video, considering the figures involved, provides additional compelling insights to push the viewer into thinking more carefully about the challenges and limits of our collective understanding of who we are, where we came from, and what it means to be here now.

I highly recommend it:

And what I think is most worth emphasizing and that may not be understood by laypeople and religious supplicants, or may not be internalized as deeply as it should be, includes:

  1. Our everyday experience and intuitions about similarly-sized matter are simply not applicable to quantum and relativistic scales, or to the implications of cosmological theories. “Causality” is one of those concepts. We see this in everything from the simple case of radioactive decay to contra-causal quantum experiments, and ultimately in the question of causation as applied to the universe itself.
  2. Science operates by applying metaphors, finding the limitations of those metaphors, filtering by empirical results, and then using the refined science as a new metaphor. Most of those metaphors are incompatible with everyday experience. If they weren’t they wouldn’t be so vexingly difficult to understand.
  3. Many philosophical worries about logical inconsistency are abstractly derived from everyday reasoning and may not apply to modern understandings of causality, space, and time.
  4. Humility about what we don’t know and effort to unravel it remains the best approach to our mysterious selves and the world.
… Read the rest

On Woo-Woo and Schrödinger’s Cat

Mark Davis1 Comment

schrodingers-cat-walks-into-a-bar-memeMichael Shermer and Sam Harris got together with an audience at Caltech to beat up on Deepak Chopra and a “storyteller” named Jean Houston in The Future of God debate hosted by ABC News. And Deepak got uncharacteristically angry back behind his crystal-embellished eyewear, especially at Shermer’s assertion that Deepak is just talking “woo-woo.”

But is there any basis for the woo-woo that Deepak is weaving? As it turns out, he is building on some fairly impressive work by Stuart Hameroff, MD, of University of Arizona and Sir Roger Penrose of Oxford University. Under development for more than 25 years, this work has most recently been summed up in their 2014 paper, “Consciousness in the universe: A review of the ‘Orch OR’ theory” available for free (but not the commentaries, alas). Deepak was even invited to comment on the paper in Physics of Life Reviews, though the content of his commentary was challenged as being somewhat orthogonal or contradictory to the main argument.

To start somewhere near the beginning, Penrose became obsessed with the limits of computation in the late 80s. The Halting Problem sums up his concerns about the idea that human minds can possibly be isomorphic with computational devices. There seems to be something that allows for breaking free of the limits of “mere” Turing Complete computation to Penrose. Whatever that something is, it should be physical and reside within the structure of the brain itself. Hameroff and Penrose would also like that something to explain consciousness and all of its confusing manifestations, for surely consciousness is part of that brain operation.

Now, to get at some necessary and sufficient sorts of explanations for this new model requires looking at Hameroff’s medical speciality: anesthesiology.… Read the rest