When newly-minted Nobel Prize winner Roger Penrose riffed on very weird physics with Joe Rogan (2018)

Joe Rogan has freedom of speech. He doesn’t have the right to a captive audience and immunity from criticism.

5 Likes

Funnily enough the most “censorship” he “endured” was when he moved to Spotify for 10s of millions of dollars and they weren’t making his episodes with the most egregious nazis available on their platform.

3 Likes

I’m not sure what scare quotes are, but you generified a person who is right here, and wasn’t sure why you did that.

Because I don’t know them personally and wasn’t sure about their gender?

1 Like

Holy cow, let’s all dial it down a notch. It’s a rhetorical structure, not an actual wishing of someone dead.

4 Likes

Love those moments where Penrose and Fridman are just bracing their heads to keep them from popping off.

1 Like

well, Penrose was almost two years older when he did Lex’s interview :slight_smile: I am watching the Joe Rogan interview right now, AAMOF, actually seems pretty good, so far, Joe just lets him talk for the most part. Lex’s interview I watched back in the spring but I think if I had to recommend one of these interview’s to someone with only a passing interest it would be Joe’s (although I know he’s a hot button for people so maybe not :slight_smile: . I’ve only seen four or five of Joe’s podcast and haven’t really encountered the stuff people complain about, but YMMV )

1 Like

haha I was thinking more in terms of their heads popping off from the content of the interview and seeing how hard their mind tanks are being stirred up by some of these ideas.
Joe Rogan interviewed Ben Goertzel on his show and called him a nerd. Imagine having some meathead actor call you a nerd after you’ve just described taking a crack at understanding quantum theory at the age of 8.
Even though Lex Fridman’s bare bones interview space looks like there’s some fold up cot right beside Sir Roger Penrose, I think he has more, depth, class and respect than that troglodyte Rogan and all his complementary HGH and testosterone boosters alongside his tacky tchotchkes.

Ya, Lex Fridman and Sean Carroll are the podcasts I favour, but I only get around to a few of each. Such a time commitment . I like Lex’s Russian soul, though :slight_smile: As to the content of Lex’s Penrose interview, that’s why I thought the Rogan might be a better experience… as I recall Penrose assumed Lex’s viewers would be familiar with a lot of the topics they touched on

1 Like

Looks like Lex Fridman interviewed Joe Rogan a week ago!
Da Do Dogan Lexperience. How much can one talk about choke holds in 2 hours?

1 Like

ya, Lex seems to idolize Joe…getting a piece of Joe’s audience would be good for him (and them)

I appreciate your clarification, genuinely.

In this era – personally, I try to be pretty specific with language I use on the interwebs. Considering there appear to be a lot of Americans who are quite literally ready to try to take their perceived political enemies out with bullets, and may attempt to do so to some degree over the next month or two.

Then why were you jumping down my throat for posting the exact same clarification?

Scrolling up here, looks like I made the same point similarly in both cases.

I think the substance of the two posts is similar but the tone certainly isn’t. But I’m not going to pursue this any further, there’s nothing productive in quibbling like this.

1 Like

I don’t know what Schrödinger said on the subject, and I have no problem with whatever thoughts he had on the mystical. What I take issue with is the misplaced appeal to authority that says physicists have some special competence to answer mystical questions, just because they happened to hear the question at their day job.

Penrose goes to great lengths to belabor how physics allows for the possibility that the macro world responds to fundamentally unknowable inputs – which, sure, not that anyone outside of 19th-century physics thought otherwise – and he concludes that consciousness must therefore be a product of this unknowability. It’s almost literally that cartoon of a whiteboard full of impressive equations, followed by “then a miracle occurs” followed by the bollocks conclusion.

The thing is, there are experts on things like the nature of subjectivity, who spend whole careers chewing that kind of problem in rigorous, enervating detail. It’s not a matter of qualifications; even as a lay reader, you can easily see that someone like (again) Daniel Dennett has a far better grasp of what he’s talking about. Penrose knows he’s using a hammer to saw a board, and he knows he’s trying to distract you with what a great gold-plated hammer he has. It’s the knowing that makes it intellectually naughty.

1 Like

I mean, you should. I’m sniping because my sniping adds to that.

Implicit in my saltiness above is that I’ve paid to read at least two of his little, hmph, “books”, and I actually semi-recommended one of them. I’m hardly cancelling the guy.

That’s not what Penrose believes at all, he thinks quantum indeterminacy will someday be explained by a fully ‘knowable’ deterministic theory. He just thinks quantum computation is required to explain consciousness (as opposed to classical computation, via a Turing machine), and for all we know he’s right, as we don’t really understand how it works.

Personally I don’t see why quantum effects will be necessary, we’re not yet in a position to know one way or the other, but I don’t see why anything other than hard-wired axioms and heuristic processes are needed to get around the computational issues he brings up (consciousness needn’t be based on some kind of perfectly logical computational process).

It’s unfair of you to classify Penrose’s position as mysticism, and ridiculous to bring Jesus into the equation (Penrose is very much an atheist). Penrose doesn’t seem to have nailed his colours to the mast in terms of any explicit philosophical position, but his ideas to me seem to be compatible with both scientific realism via emergence, and with something like property dualism, neither of which are in the slightest bit mystical.

2 Likes

Yes, the Jesus bit was hyperbole. What Penrose is concerned with is how to fit consciousness into a scientific, post-Enlightenment world view.

But he takes for granted – and keeps telling the public, who might think he’s an authority here – that the nature of consciousness is a mystery which needs solving (by physics, apparently). And that presumably comes as a surprise to the academic field of the philosophy of mind, which has moved quite a long way past that point in the last few centuries.

Most scientifically-minded people have at some point scratched their head over what it means that I experience being me (perhaps in proximity to a bong). Fewer people stop to ask (perhaps in proximity to a tab of acid) whether that experience itself actually exists, in the sense that protons exist. But if you’re being at all rigorous, before you go looking for new physics to explain the former, you first need to answer the latter, and that turns out to be a bigger issue than we all inherently assume.

The reason I call Penrose’s kind of thought “mystical” is that – whether or not he has considered this himself – it is essentially a mystical belief to assert that one’s subjective viewpoint “exists” purely because one believes that it does. If you drop that assumption – which we would never entertain to begin with in any other scientific discussion – then there is no mystery to solve.

1 Like

:rofl:
er …