Consciousness is Not a Computation (Roger Penrose)

00:00:00.000 | I'm trying to say that whatever consciousness is,

00:00:05.000 | it's not a computation.

00:00:08.200 | - Yes.

00:00:09.040 | - Or it's not a physical process

00:00:10.700 | which can be described by computation.

00:00:14.780 | - But it nevertheless could be,

00:00:16.300 | so one of the interesting models that you've proposed

00:00:21.300 | is the orchestrated objective reduction.

00:00:23.420 | - Yes, well you see that's going from there, you see.

00:00:26.100 | So I say I have no idea.

00:00:28.180 | So I wrote this book through my scientific career.

00:00:31.780 | I thought, you know, when I'm retired,

00:00:34.100 | I'll have enough time to write a sort of a popularish book

00:00:37.140 | which I will explain my ideas and puzzles,

00:00:42.620 | what I like, beautiful things about physics and mathematics,

00:00:45.580 | and this puzzle about computability

00:00:48.900 | and consciousness and so on.

00:00:50.980 | And in the process of writing this book,

00:00:54.540 | well I thought I'd do it when I was retired.

00:00:55.900 | I didn't actually, I didn't wait that long

00:00:57.700 | because there was a radio discussion

00:01:00.820 | between Edward Fredkin and Marvin Minsky.

00:01:05.580 | And they were talking about what computers could do,

00:01:09.620 | and they were entering a big room,

00:01:11.940 | they imagined entering this big room,

00:01:13.460 | where at the other end of the room,

00:01:15.220 | two computers were talking to each other.

00:01:18.340 | And as you walk up to the computers,

00:01:20.660 | they will have communicated to each other

00:01:23.140 | more ideas, concepts, things,

00:01:26.500 | than the entire human race had ever done.

00:01:29.540 | So I thought, well I know where you're coming from,

00:01:33.060 | but I just don't believe you.

00:01:35.060 | There's something missing.

00:01:36.300 | So I thought, well, I should write my book.

00:01:40.660 | And so I did.

00:01:43.060 | It was roughly the same time Stephen Hawking

00:01:45.500 | was writing his Brief History of Time.

00:01:49.100 | - In the '80s at some point.

00:01:52.660 | The book you're talking about is The Emperor's New Mind.

00:01:54.340 | - The Emperor's New Mind, that's right.

00:01:55.420 | - And both are incredible books,

00:01:57.540 | The Brief History of Time and The Emperor's New Mind.

00:01:59.900 | - Yes, it was quite interesting,

00:02:01.300 | 'cause he told me he'd got Carl Sagan, I think,

00:02:04.860 | to write a forward.

00:02:06.380 | - It's a good get.

00:02:07.220 | - To the book, you see.

00:02:08.060 | So I thought, gosh, what am I gonna do?

00:02:09.580 | I'm not gonna get anywhere unless I get somebody.

00:02:12.460 | So I said, oh, I know Martin Gardner,

00:02:14.100 | so I wonder if he'd do it.

00:02:15.780 | So he did, and he did a very nice forward.

00:02:18.060 | - So that's an incredible book,

00:02:19.660 | and some of the same people you mentioned,

00:02:21.820 | Ed Franken, which I guess of expert systems fame,

00:02:26.020 | and Minsky, of course, people know in the AI world,

00:02:28.380 | but they represent the artificial intelligence world.

00:02:30.300 | - Absolutely, that's right.

00:02:31.220 | - That do hope and dream that AI's intelligence is--

00:02:34.740 | - That's right.

00:02:35.580 | Well, you see, it was my thinking,

00:02:36.400 | well, you know, I see where they're coming from,

00:02:38.420 | and from that perspective--

00:02:39.260 | - I disagree.

00:02:40.100 | - Yeah, you're right, but that's not my perspective.

00:02:43.020 | So I thought I had to say it.

00:02:44.860 | And as I was writing my book, you see,

00:02:46.460 | I thought, well, I don't really know anything

00:02:48.100 | about neurophysiology, what am I doing writing this book?

00:02:50.580 | So I started reading up about neurophysiology,

00:02:53.540 | and I read, and I think, I'm trying to find out

00:02:55.380 | how it is that nerve signals could possibly

00:02:57.860 | preserve quantum coherence.

00:02:59.740 | And all I read is that the electrical signals

00:03:02.300 | which go along the nerves create effects through the brain,

00:03:06.940 | there's no chance you can isolate it.

00:03:09.620 | So this is hopeless.

00:03:11.260 | So I come to the end of the book,

00:03:13.060 | and I more or less give up.

00:03:14.980 | I just think of something which I didn't believe in,

00:03:17.580 | as maybe this is the way around it, but no.

00:03:19.820 | And then you see, I thought, well, maybe this book

00:03:23.020 | will at least stimulate young people

00:03:24.780 | to do science or something,

00:03:26.540 | and I got all these letters from old, retired people instead.

00:03:29.860 | These are the only people who had time to read my book.

00:03:32.620 | - So, I mean--

00:03:34.540 | - Except for Stuart Hameroff.

00:03:36.340 | - Except for Stuart Hameroff.

00:03:37.820 | - Stuart Hameroff wrote to me, and he said,

00:03:39.780 | "I think you're missing something.

00:03:41.480 | "You don't know about microtubules, do you?"

00:03:44.820 | He didn't put it quite like that,

00:03:46.240 | but that was more or less it.

00:03:47.340 | And he said, "This is what you really need to consider."

00:03:50.260 | So I thought, my God, yes,

00:03:52.020 | that's a much more promising structure.

00:03:54.340 | - So, I mean, fundamentally, you were searching

00:03:57.740 | for the source of, non-computable source of consciousness

00:04:02.740 | within the human brain, in the biology.

00:04:06.460 | And so, what are, if I may ask, what are microtubules?

00:04:11.460 | - Well, you see, I was ignorant in what I'd read.

00:04:15.300 | I never came across them in the books I looked at.

00:04:19.140 | Perhaps I only read rather superficially, which is true.

00:04:22.300 | But I didn't know about microtubules.

00:04:24.540 | Stuart, I think one of the things

00:04:26.700 | that impressed him about them

00:04:28.260 | was when you see pictures of mitosis,

00:04:30.300 | that's a cell dividing, and you see all the chromosomes,

00:04:34.740 | and the chromosomes, they all get lined up,

00:04:37.100 | and then they get pulled apart.

00:04:39.420 | And so, as the cell divides, half the chromosomes go,

00:04:43.060 | you know, they divide into the two parts,

00:04:46.380 | and they go two different ways.

00:04:48.860 | And what is it that's pulling them apart?

00:04:51.260 | Well, those are these little things called microtubules.

00:04:54.340 | And so he started to get interested in them.

00:04:57.020 | And he formed a view, well, he was,

00:05:00.340 | his day job or night job, or whatever you call it,

00:05:02.540 | is to put people to sleep,

00:05:04.500 | except he doesn't like calling it sleep

00:05:06.140 | because it's different,

00:05:07.260 | general anesthetics, in a reversible way.

00:05:10.740 | So you want to make sure that they don't experience the pain

00:05:14.460 | that would otherwise be something that they feel.

00:05:18.220 | And consciousness is turned off for a while,

00:05:21.780 | and it can be turned back on again.

00:05:23.340 | So it's crucial that you can turn it off and turn it on.

00:05:26.380 | And what do you do when you're doing that?

00:05:28.900 | What do general anesthetic gases do?

00:05:31.140 | And see, he formed the view

00:05:34.740 | that it's the microtubules that they affect.

00:05:38.340 | And the details of why he formed that view is not,

00:05:42.460 | well, they're clear to me,

00:05:43.780 | but there's an interesting story he keeps talking about.

00:05:47.100 | But I found this very exciting

00:05:49.940 | because I thought these structures,

00:05:52.940 | these little tubes which inhabit pretty well all cells,

00:05:56.860 | it's not just neurons,

00:05:58.220 | apart from red blood cells,

00:06:02.020 | they inhabit pretty well all the other cells in the body.

00:06:05.380 | But they're not all the same kind.

00:06:06.820 | You get different kinds of microtubules.

00:06:09.460 | And the ones that excited me the most,

00:06:13.180 | this may still not be totally clear,

00:06:15.940 | but the ones that excited me most

00:06:17.620 | were the only ones that I knew about at the time,

00:06:20.740 | because they're very, very symmetrical structures.

00:06:24.700 | And I had reason to believe

00:06:27.060 | that these very symmetrical structures

00:06:29.540 | would be much better at preserving a quantum state,

00:06:33.580 | quantum coherence,

00:06:34.540 | preserving the thing without,

00:06:36.180 | you just need to preserve certain degrees of freedom

00:06:40.240 | without them leaking into the environment.

00:06:42.540 | Once they leak into the environment, you're lost.

00:06:44.860 | So you've got to preserve these quantum states at a level

00:06:49.580 | which the state reduction process comes in,

00:06:53.860 | and that's where I think the non-computability comes in.

00:06:57.660 | And it's the measurement process in quantum mechanics,

00:07:01.140 | what's going on.

00:07:02.300 | - So something about the measurement process

00:07:05.060 | and what's going on,

00:07:05.900 | something about the structure of the microtubules,

00:07:08.620 | your intuition says, maybe there's something here.

00:07:11.020 | Maybe this kind of structure allows

00:07:13.980 | for the mystery of the quantum mechanics.

00:07:16.980 | - There was a much better chance, yes.

00:07:18.740 | It just struck me that partly it was the symmetry,

00:07:22.260 | because there is a feature of symmetry.

00:07:24.660 | You can preserve quantum coherence

00:07:27.780 | much better with symmetrical structures.

00:07:29.660 | And so there's a good reason for that.

00:07:31.820 | And that impressed me a lot.

00:07:34.020 | I didn't know the difference between the A-lattice

00:07:36.180 | and B-lattice at that time, which could be important.

00:07:39.440 | No, that couldn't, which isn't talked about much.

00:07:42.340 | - But that's in some sense details.

00:07:44.100 | We've got to take a step back just to say,

00:07:45.820 | in case people are not familiar.

00:07:47.620 | So this was called the orchestrated objective reduction idea

00:07:52.620 | or ORC-OR, which is a biological philosophy of mind

00:07:59.860 | that postulates that consciousness originates

00:08:02.100 | at the quantum level inside neurons.

00:08:03.740 | So that has to do with your search for where,

00:08:06.700 | where is it coming from?

00:08:08.060 | So that's counter to the notion that consciousness

00:08:10.940 | might arise from the computation performed by the synapses.

00:08:14.580 | - Yes, I think the key point,

00:08:16.940 | sometimes people say it's because it's quantum mechanical.

00:08:21.940 | It's not just that.

00:08:24.020 | See, it's more outrageous than that.

00:08:26.440 | You see, this is one reason I think we're so far off from it

00:08:29.700 | because we don't even know the physics right.

00:08:32.420 | You see, it's not just quantum mechanics.

00:08:35.220 | People say, oh, you know,

00:08:36.300 | quantum systems and biological structures.

00:08:38.700 | No, well, you're starting to see

00:08:40.500 | that some basic biological systems does depend on quantum.

00:08:45.500 | I mean, look, in the first place,

00:08:48.940 | all of chemistry is quantum mechanics.

00:08:51.180 | People got used to that, so they don't count that.

00:08:54.480 | So he said, let's not count quantum chemistry.

00:08:58.020 | We sort of got the hang of that, I think.

00:09:00.500 | But you have quantum effects,

00:09:02.740 | which are not just chemical, in photosynthesis.

00:09:06.820 | And this is one of the striking things

00:09:08.620 | in the last several years,

00:09:10.700 | that photosynthesis seems to be a basically quantum process,

00:09:15.620 | which is not simply chemical.

00:09:18.260 | It's using quantum mechanics in a very basic way.

00:09:22.860 | So you could start saying, oh, well,

00:09:24.500 | with photosynthesis is based on quantum mechanics,

00:09:26.980 | why not behavior of neurons and things like that?

00:09:31.660 | Maybe there's something which is a bit like photosynthesis

00:09:35.140 | in that respect.

00:09:36.460 | But what I'm saying is even more outrageous than that,

00:09:39.520 | because those things are talking

00:09:42.180 | about conventional quantum mechanics.

00:09:45.100 | Now, my argument says that conventional quantum mechanics,

00:09:48.940 | if you're just following the Schrodinger equation,

00:09:50.820 | that's still computable.

00:09:53.100 | So you've got to go beyond that.

00:09:55.300 | So you've got to go to where quantum mechanics goes wrong

00:10:00.300 | in a certain sense.

00:10:02.460 | You have to be a little bit careful about that,

00:10:05.180 | because the way people do quantum mechanics

00:10:07.420 | is a sort of mixture of two different processes.

00:10:12.420 | One of them is the Schrodinger equation,

00:10:16.860 | which is an equation that Schrodinger wrote down,

00:10:20.220 | and it tells you how the state of a system evolves.

00:10:24.020 | And it evolves, according to this equation,

00:10:26.180 | completely deterministic,

00:10:28.740 | but it evolves into ridiculous situations.

00:10:31.740 | And this was what Schrodinger was very much pointing out

00:10:34.100 | with his cat.

00:10:35.660 | He says, you follow my equation,

00:10:37.260 | that's Schrodinger's equation,

00:10:38.800 | and you could say that you have to,

00:10:41.620 | you have a cat which is dead and alive at the same time.

00:10:45.700 | That would be the evolution of the Schrodinger equation

00:10:48.580 | would lead to a state,

00:10:50.140 | which is the cat being dead and alive at the same time.

00:10:54.140 | And he's more or less saying, this is an absurdity.

00:10:57.100 | People nowadays say, oh, well, Schrodinger said

00:10:59.820 | you can have a cat which is dead and alive.

00:11:01.180 | It's not that, you see, he was saying, this is an absurdity.

00:11:04.840 | There's something missing.

00:11:06.180 | And that the reduction of the state

00:11:10.060 | or the collapse of the wave function or whatever it is,

00:11:13.380 | is something which has to be understood.

00:11:16.160 | It's not following the Schrodinger equation.

00:11:19.220 | It's not the way we conventionally do quantum mechanics.

00:11:23.340 | There's something more than that.

00:11:25.020 | And it's easy to quote authority here because Einstein,

00:11:29.640 | at least three of the greatest physicists of 20th century,

00:11:36.140 | who were very fundamental in developing quantum mechanics,

00:11:40.180 | Einstein, one of them, Schrodinger, another, Dirac, another.

00:11:45.020 | You have to look carefully at Dirac's writing

00:11:46.900 | 'cause he didn't tend to say this out loud very much

00:11:50.580 | 'cause he was very cautious about what he said.

00:11:52.700 | You find the right place and you see,

00:11:54.900 | he says quantum mechanics is a provisional theory.

00:11:58.020 | We need something which explains

00:12:03.060 | the collapse of a wave function.

00:12:04.900 | We need to go beyond the theory we have now.

00:12:07.620 | I happen to be one of the kinds of people,

00:12:11.300 | there are many, there is a whole group of people,

00:12:13.260 | they're all considered to be a bit mavericks,

00:12:16.980 | who believe that quantum mechanics needs to be modified.

00:12:20.300 | There's a small minority of those people,

00:12:22.580 | which are already a minority,

00:12:24.140 | who think that the way in which it's modified

00:12:27.620 | has to be with gravity.

00:12:28.940 | And there is an even smaller minority of those people

00:12:32.820 | who think it's the particular way that I think it is.

00:12:35.940 | So-- - So those are

00:12:37.020 | the quantum gravity folks, but what's--

00:12:38.900 | - You see, quantum gravity is already not this

00:12:42.100 | because when you say quantum gravity,

00:12:44.020 | what you really mean is quantum mechanics

00:12:46.820 | applied to gravitational theory.

00:12:49.380 | So you say, let's take this wonderful formalism

00:12:52.020 | of quantum mechanics and make gravity fit into it.

00:12:56.600 | So that is what quantum gravity is meant to be.

00:12:59.440 | Now I'm saying, you've got to be more even handed,

00:13:02.860 | that gravity affects the structure

00:13:04.540 | of quantum mechanics too.

00:13:05.820 | It's not just you quantize gravity,

00:13:08.220 | you've got to gravitize quantum mechanics.

00:13:10.820 | And it's a two-way thing.

00:13:12.540 | - But then when do you even get started?

00:13:14.380 | So that you're saying that we have to figure out

00:13:16.700 | a totally new ideas in that. - Exactly.

00:13:19.360 | No, you're stuck, you don't have a theory.

00:13:22.660 | That's the trouble.

00:13:24.180 | So this is a big problem, actually,

00:13:26.140 | you say, okay, well, what's the theory?

00:13:27.340 | I don't know. (laughs)

00:13:28.660 | - So maybe in the very early days, sort of--

00:13:30.820 | - It is in the very early days,

00:13:32.420 | but just making this point. - Yes.

00:13:35.180 | - You see, Stuart Hameroff tends to be,

00:13:37.180 | oh, Penrose says that it's got to be

00:13:39.540 | a reduction of the state and so on, so let's use it.

00:13:41.980 | The trouble is Penrose doesn't say that.

00:13:43.500 | Penrose says, well, I think that.

00:13:45.300 | (laughs)

00:13:46.860 | We have no experiments as yet, which shows that.

00:13:51.460 | There are experiments which are being thought through

00:13:53.940 | and which I'm hoping will be performed.

00:13:57.100 | There is an experiment which is being developed

00:13:59.700 | by Dirk Baumeister, who I've known for a long time,

00:14:03.420 | who shares his time between Leiden in the Netherlands

00:14:06.700 | and Santa Barbara in the US.

00:14:09.260 | And he's been working on an experiment

00:14:11.100 | which could perhaps demonstrate that quantum mechanics,

00:14:16.100 | as we now understand it,

00:14:18.020 | if you don't bring in the gravitational effects,

00:14:20.420 | has to be modified.

00:14:23.120 | - And then there's also experiments that are underway

00:14:27.380 | that kind of look at the microtubule side of things

00:14:32.020 | to see if there's, in the biology,

00:14:33.980 | you could see something like that.

00:14:35.220 | Could you briefly mention it?

00:14:36.420 | Because that's a really sort of

00:14:38.460 | one of the only experimental attempts

00:14:41.100 | in the very early days of even thinking about consciousness.

00:14:44.140 | - I think there's a very serious area here,

00:14:46.820 | which is what Stuart Hemoroff is doing,

00:14:48.700 | and I think it's very important.

00:14:50.420 | One of the few places that you can really get

00:14:53.140 | a bit of a handle on what consciousness is

00:14:56.180 | is what turns it off.

00:14:58.440 | And when you're thinking about general anesthetics,

00:15:01.420 | it's very specific.

00:15:03.060 | These things turn consciousness off.

00:15:05.620 | What the hell do they do?

00:15:07.700 | Well, Stuart and a number of people who work with him

00:15:11.300 | and others happen to believe that the general anesthetics

00:15:15.820 | directly affect microtubules.

00:15:18.140 | And there is some evidence for this.

00:15:20.060 | I don't know how strong it is

00:15:21.580 | and how watertight the case is,

00:15:25.180 | but I think there is some evidence

00:15:26.780 | pointing in that kind of direction.

00:15:30.540 | It's not just an ordinary chemical process.

00:15:32.580 | There's something quite different about it.

00:15:34.900 | And one of the main candidates is that

00:15:38.820 | the anesthetic gases do affect directly microtubules.

00:15:43.040 | And how strong that evidence is,

00:15:45.860 | I wouldn't be in a position to say,

00:15:48.500 | but I think there is fairly impressive evidence.

00:15:51.260 | - And the point is the experiments are being undertaken,

00:15:54.100 | which is-- - Yes.

00:15:54.940 | I mean, that is experimental.

00:15:56.100 | You see, so it's a very clear direction

00:15:58.660 | where you can think of experiments which could indicate

00:16:02.300 | whether or not it's really microtubules,

00:16:04.500 | which the anesthetic gases directly affect.

00:16:07.500 | - That's really exciting.

00:16:08.700 | One of the sad things is, as far as I'm,

00:16:11.780 | from my outside perspective,

00:16:13.180 | is not many people are working on this.

00:16:15.820 | So there's a very, like with Stuart,

00:16:18.660 | it feels like there's very few people

00:16:20.340 | are carrying the flag forward on this.

00:16:22.660 | - I think it's not many in the sense it's a minority,

00:16:26.260 | but it's not zero anymore.

00:16:27.820 | You see, when Stuart and I were originally taught by this--

00:16:30.500 | - It was zero.

00:16:31.340 | - We were just us and a few of our friends,

00:16:34.260 | there weren't many people taking it,

00:16:35.620 | but it's grown into one of the main viewpoints.

00:16:40.620 | There might be about four or five or six different views

00:16:44.660 | that people hold, and it's one of them.

00:16:49.060 | So it's considered as one of the possible

00:16:52.460 | lines of thinking, yes.

00:16:54.780 | - You describe physics theories

00:16:56.500 | as falling into one of three categories,

00:16:58.340 | the superb, the useful, or the tentative.

00:17:01.260 | I like those words.

00:17:03.100 | It's a beautiful categorization.

00:17:04.980 | Do you think we'll ever have a superb theory

00:17:08.380 | of intelligence and of consciousness?

00:17:11.180 | - We might.

00:17:12.020 | We're a long way from it.

00:17:15.100 | I don't think we're even,

00:17:16.420 | whether we're in the tentative scale.

00:17:18.300 | I mean, it's--

00:17:19.260 | - You don't think we've even entered

00:17:22.660 | the realm of tentative?

00:17:23.860 | - Probably not, I think it's--

00:17:24.700 | - Yeah, that's right.

00:17:25.940 | - No, when you see this, it's so controversial.

00:17:28.540 | We don't have a clear view,

00:17:30.580 | which is accepted by a majority.

00:17:34.500 | I mean, you say, yeah, people,

00:17:35.740 | most views are computational in one form or another.

00:17:38.700 | I think it's some, but it's not very clear,

00:17:40.660 | 'cause even the IIT people who think of them

00:17:45.660 | as computational, but I've heard them say,

00:17:49.300 | "No, consciousness is supposed to be not computational."

00:17:51.420 | I say, "Well, if it's not computational,

00:17:52.340 | "what in the hell is it?

00:17:53.460 | "What's going on?

00:17:55.460 | "What physical processes are going on which are that?"

00:18:00.300 | - What does it mean for something to be computational then?

00:18:03.100 | So, is--

00:18:05.180 | - Well, there has to be a process which is,

00:18:08.980 | you see, it's very curious the way the history

00:18:13.220 | has developed in quantum mechanics,

00:18:15.540 | because very early on, people thought

00:18:17.460 | there was something to do with consciousness,

00:18:19.180 | but it was almost the other way around.

00:18:21.380 | You see, you have to say the Schrodinger equations

00:18:24.380 | says all these different alternatives happen all at once,

00:18:27.420 | and then when is it that only one of them happens?

00:18:29.940 | Well, one of the views, which was quite commonly held

00:18:32.220 | by a few distinguished quantum physicists,

00:18:34.860 | that's when a conscious being looks at the system

00:18:38.020 | or becomes aware of it, and at that point,

00:18:40.700 | it becomes one or the other.

00:18:42.100 | That's a role where consciousness

00:18:45.100 | is somehow actively reducing the state.

00:18:48.420 | My view is almost the exact opposite of that.

00:18:51.500 | It's the state reduces itself in some way which,

00:18:55.540 | some non-computational way which we don't understand,

00:18:58.500 | we don't have a proper theory of,

00:19:00.580 | and that is the building block of what consciousness is.

00:19:05.580 | So consciousness, it's the other way around.

00:19:07.620 | It depends on that choice which nature makes all the time

00:19:12.620 | when the state becomes one or the other,

00:19:14.500 | rather than the superposition of one and the other,

00:19:17.420 | and when that happens, there is what we're saying now,

00:19:20.940 | an element of proto-consciousness takes place.

00:19:24.480 | Proto-consciousness is, roughly speaking,

00:19:26.980 | the building block out of which

00:19:28.760 | actual consciousness is constructed.

00:19:31.420 | So you have these proto-conscious elements

00:19:34.540 | which are when the state decides

00:19:36.380 | to do one thing or the other,

00:19:38.900 | and that's the thing which, when organized together,

00:19:42.900 | that's the OR part in OrcOR, but the Orc part,

00:19:46.780 | that's the, the OR part, at least one can see

00:19:49.940 | where we're driving at a theory.

00:19:51.620 | You can say it's the quantum choice

00:19:54.500 | of going this way or that way,

00:19:56.060 | but the Orc part, which is the orchestration of this,

00:19:59.060 | is much more mysterious,

00:20:00.940 | and how does the brain somehow orchestrate

00:20:04.620 | all these individual OR processes

00:20:07.940 | into a genuine conscious experience?

00:20:12.940 | - And it might be something that's beautifully simple,

00:20:16.460 | but we're completely in the dark about.

00:20:19.140 | - Yeah, I think at the moment, that's the thing.

00:20:21.580 | You know, we happily put the word Orc down there

00:20:24.300 | to say orchestrated, but that's even more unclear

00:20:28.860 | what that really means.

00:20:30.420 | - Just like the word material, orchestrated, who knows?

00:20:35.420 | And we've been dancing a little bit

00:20:37.580 | between the word intelligence

00:20:40.140 | or understanding and consciousness.

00:20:42.340 | Do you kind of see those as sitting

00:20:44.420 | in the same space of mystery as we've been discussing?

00:20:47.180 | - Yes, but you see, I tend to say

00:20:49.180 | you have understanding and intelligence and awareness.

00:20:55.020 | And somehow, understanding is in the middle of it.

00:21:00.020 | You see, I like to say, could you say of an entity

00:21:05.540 | that is actually intelligent

00:21:09.220 | if it doesn't have the quality of understanding?

00:21:11.740 | Maybe I'm using terms I don't even know how to define,

00:21:15.100 | but who cares?

00:21:15.940 | I'm just relating them.

00:21:16.780 | - They're somewhat poetic, so if I somehow understand them.

00:21:19.860 | - Yes, that's right, we don't, exactly.

00:21:22.260 | - But they're not mathematical in nature.

00:21:23.660 | - Yes, you see, as a mathematician,

00:21:25.460 | I don't know how to define any of them,

00:21:26.780 | but at least I can point to the connections.

00:21:28.820 | So the idea is intelligence is something

00:21:31.620 | which I believe needs understanding.

00:21:35.340 | Otherwise, you wouldn't say it's really intelligence.

00:21:37.780 | And understanding needs awareness.

00:21:40.820 | Otherwise, you wouldn't really say it's understanding.

00:21:43.380 | Do you say of an entity that understands something,

00:21:46.220 | unless it's really aware of it, in our normal usage.

00:21:49.820 | So there's a three sort of awareness, understanding,

00:21:53.180 | and intelligence.

00:21:55.220 | And I just tend to concentrate on understanding

00:21:58.940 | because that's where I can say something.

00:22:01.180 | And that's the Godel theorem, things like that.

00:22:03.380 | But what does it mean to perceive the color blue

00:22:07.860 | or something, I mean, foggiest?

00:22:09.900 | That's a much more difficult question.

00:22:12.460 | I mean, is it the same if I see a color blue and you see it?

00:22:15.460 | If you're something with, what, this condition,

00:22:17.980 | what is it called?

00:22:19.700 | - Oh, where you assign a sound to a color?

00:22:22.940 | - Yeah, yeah, that's right.

00:22:23.780 | You get colors and sounds mixed up.

00:22:26.100 | And that sort of thing.

00:22:27.220 | I mean, an interesting subject.

00:22:29.140 | - But from the physics perspective,

00:22:32.220 | from the fundamentals perspective, we don't.

00:22:34.580 | - I think we're way off having much understanding

00:22:37.660 | what's going on there.

00:22:38.980 | (whooshing)

00:22:41.300 | (whooshing)

00:22:43.620 | (whooshing)

00:22:45.940 | (whooshing)

00:22:48.260 | (whooshing)

00:22:50.580 | (whooshing)

00:22:52.900 | (whooshing)

00:22:55.220 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

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

Chapters