An Admission - I’d never read Roger Penrose (1989) “Emperor’s New Mind” until now.

I have seen him talk at various events on consciousness and cosmology, and seen hundreds of references to his work in the reading I have done. For someone originally a mathematician with a prior fascination in fundamental physics, he’s clearly very thoughtful philosophically about the whole - life, the universe and everything.

I guess I’ve rejected him until now because, in the mind field, I associate him with Stuart Hameroff searching for a quantum mechanical solution in a wet and noisy “bowl of porridge”.

As I’ve said before, their OrchOR / Micro-Tubules science may be good science of real brain processes(*) - not my field - but I still believe it misses the point of what consciousness is. (* obviously I’m interested in the processes, and accept many levels of complexity beyond “cartoon (on-off-firing) neurons” in the underlying science of those processes, that I don’t actually need to know, to understand minds, consciousness, intelligence and causal-will. Time will tell.)

In ENM the main thrust is indeed understanding human minds and there is a clear prior commitment that the solution will lie in quantum physics and thus a need for deep mathematical (Platonic) understanding of the maths underlying such physics. For a book so many cite having read I was actually shocked at the amount of mathematical notation presented, through he equally clearly says you can skip over it without losing his argument. (My point precisely - there is stuff we don’t need to know in order to understand minds?) As the cover blurbs also say - it is full of nuggets whether you’re following the whole argument or not. (If I’d read it in 1989, I would have been impressed - I’d read Hawking’s magnum opus in 1988 and the “Cartoon History of Time” version in 1990. Penrose too majors on time as the 4th dimension of space-time as part of disentangling the mysteries of the quantum and relativity worlds.)

I think I am generally following the argument, I simply disagree about his main thrust and what we need to know. Obviously there is a great deal of 20th/21st C science I’ve got from other sources.

Something else I’ve said before, if we need to understand all such detail at all levels of abstraction and complex reality, in order to be able to share a model of how mind works, we actually have a useless model. Like quantum mechanics itself, only a small group of experts - in a vast range of subjects - can understand it, it’s not useful. A saving grace for Penrose is he does often fall back on “but is it useful” arguments. I can’t imagine many people, without multiple reads and copious follow-up research could come close to saying they literally understand all the detail Penrose presents in ENM.

ANYWAY, I’m still on the information & complex systems side of the fence. When I say “computation” I’m not invoking “algorithmic computability” or any kind of Strong-AI arguments, with which he tars many sources I cite, not least Doug Hofstadter and Dan Dennett. Computation - processing information - is simply what physics and minds do. There are many algorithmic AND non-algorithmic processes at work in many layered complex self-adaptive systems. There is no single algorithmic solution to the whole. How could there be? How could conscious causal-will escape determinism without being broken by emergent complexity?

He rightly points out a muddy confusion between determinism and formal computability. He seems skeptical of Darwinian evolution being a fundamental “superb” class of science. Despite all the usual second-law / entropy arguments he never comes close to entertaining non-Ergodicity / Historicity concepts in multi-layered complex evolution, (not even in his later works, thanks to a ChatGPT search).

Of its time - quite quaint references to the advancing magic of digital (and quantum) computers, back in 1989.

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Post Note - continued an elaboration of the this note with a post on Hameroff’s collaboration with Penrose on consciousness, through their OrchOR/Microtubules theory. psybertron.substack.com…

Good News - thanks to the help of ChatGPT - I now have my library well-organised and indexed, so I can pop ENM on the shelf for future reference, confident I can find it if and when I need it.

Next Task - semantic-web integration of the library with my Psybertron posts using Obsidian Zettelkasten tools, with the ongoing help of ChatGPT.

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