this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2024
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Physics
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Penrose like Linus Pauling went down the crackpot road which damaged his reputation.
Pauling went around news programs claiming mega doses of vitamin C would cure cancer.
Penrose got into "quantum mind" crackpottery.
Weird way to say:
Nonsense is still nonsense. Penrose like many physicists, is speculating outside of his core expertise to his own detriment.
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He's been focusing on it for like 20 years... And not on his own, he's been working with psychologists and anesthesiologists. Dude is pretty much the only physicist working at understanding consciousness, he's literally the expert
And that's not even getting into how physics is technically outside his expertise. Dudes a mathematician, he just applied that to physics, then applied physics to brains.
He doesn't claim to understand all of it, just like Einstein died before his shit was proven. Then Penrose showed up and worked with Hawking to prove a lot of Einstein's theories.
Penrose 100% accepts he won't live long enough to see his stuff finished. But he's confident it's in the right direction and if future generations keep working, some day we'll actually understand what consciousness is.
But it's not exactly easy man.
Penrose is a physicist. Thats where his expertise lies. He is not a neuroscientist, psychologist or any other profession that is relevant. He is NOT an expert in the area he has barged into. Being competent in one field DOES NOT translate into competence in others.
You may as well ask a very good plumber about how they think the brain works.
Okay but you can probably ask someone that is not a biologist to learn about certain aspects of the brain and how it works. While you can't ask a plumber how the brain works for example, you can probably get his perspective on things related to blood flow (to some extent). Maybe you ask a chemist about certain chemicals in the brain and so on.
It might not be the best idea however to claim as a plumber that consciousmess is a series of pipes, but it's fine to give a view of something through a different lens.
Hell, neither me or you are experts in any of this, or experts in something to do with debating scientists or socials in gneeral, but here we are giving perspectives anyway.
My perspective is that someones' opinion isnt worth anything unless they actually have relevant expertise in what they are talking about. I do not need a degree in neuroscience to point that out.
Some opinions are worth more than others. Opinions based on facts and relevant expertise matter more than ones that arent. Penrose DOES NOT have the expertise needed to be taken seriously when it comes to consciousness.
My perspective is that someone's opinion is to be heard even if they have no expertise in a field. I am not saying their opinion should be more valued than one of an expert's, but i am not going to criticise or disregard them completely just because their field is something else.
What I am saying is we might simply miss out on some things if not for an opinion from someone in a different field. Even if that opinion is insane 90%, it might give us a push in a direction we haven't considered before. A biologist, a chemist, a physicist can look at a table and say different things about said table that hold true, without having an expertise in making tables.
That's not how any of this works. You see in science you have to actually do the work needed to support your hypothesis. And that hypothesis needs to be based on you understanding all the material that went into that hypothesis. Penrose hasn't done any of that. He doesn't have the expertise needed to form a good model for consciousness and he hasn't done the work to support that model.
In science, ideas that aren't supported by evidence are thrown in the trash not treated as worthy of further discussion. That's why we don't give astrology or young earth creationism the time of day. Because there is nothing to support them and a mountain of evidence against them. Just like there is nothing to support Penrose's ideas about consciousness.
Science is not a safe space. You have to actually defend your ideas against scrutiny.
Yeah, and I would too. Wouldn't ask you for advice though. What did Penrose do to you, anyway? Nobody should be barred from learning new fields just because they already know one. Biochemists benefit massively from AI but they're backgrounds aren't traditionally computer science
Biochemists arent claiming that they know AI better than AI researchers do. If you dont understand why it is dangerous to be talking about things outside of your wheelhouse then there is no arguing with you.
There are dozens of ideas. It's ok if a researcher says, "I don't know."
Besides, Penrose has no idea either. He only adds an extra "quantum did it" layer between "this is what we know" and "this is how consciousness works."
Claiming a brain is a quantum computer doesn't answer any questions about consciousness.