Smart point! As Thomas Aquinas said, you can’t spell “rigorf” without “gif”.
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Penrose is perfectly qualified to have an opinion on this stuff, he’s a smart guy. Philosophy hasn’t really moved past much at all in the last century, there are lots of different schools of thought, all incompatible with one another in various ways (and as I’ve pointed out, Penrose’s ideas are perfectly compatible with some of them), even within the computational theory of mind people there are dozens of competing ideas. Very few of these arguments have been definitively settled, and likely won’t be settled until someone builds a general AI (and even then people will start talking about zombies).
Of course conscious experience ‘really’ exists, we just don’t know what that existence truly entails, just as we don’t know what the ‘real’ existence of the proton means (and that was a bad example, as protons are not real things in and of themselves, being made of quarks, and we don’t even know if quarks are fundamental for certain). The realness of consciousness is just as fuzzy a concept as the realness of matter and energy. But without accepting conscious experience as real you cannot go on to accept the realness of anything else, it’s a required assumption for even beginning to think about anything else.
He’s not proposing any new physics to explain anything, he’s proposing existing relatively well understood and empirically established physics to explain unanswered questions. I think he’s probably wrong, but his guess is as good as anyone else’s at this point.
Mysticism and metaphysics are not the same thing, there have been plenty of attempts to do away with metaphysics, but they have all been self refuting failures (logical positivism being the most obvious example, epistemic relativism another). Ultimately some metaphysical assumptions need to be made, otherwise we can’t move beyond solipsism, and certain assumptions logically entail other assumptions - acceptance of the scientific method requires a basic assumption that our conscious experience is real for example (resting as it does on a causal chain which begins with our simple conscious experience of experiments). The best we can hope for is to minimise the set of assumptions we’re making, accept that which is required on pragmatic grounds, and just get on with it.
Interestingly, these metaphysical questions mirror pretty closely the problems Penrose is talking about as well (Godel’s incompleteness theorem), and while I don’t think the incompleteness theorem will be shown to apply to human minds (making Penrose’s hypothesis unnecessary), I do think it might apply to the human practice of science, philosophy and mathematics in general, perhaps even to the very idea of intelligence itself (though maybe more in a metaphorical rather than formal sense).
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My disagreement isn’t with anything proceeding from that assertion – it’s with the assertion itself.
If I think of my subjective experience simply as a book written in the first person, that explanation is sufficient, including to me, without requiring some additional entity to “read” that book.
I guess we’re all wired to balk at this idea. “But I know I experience myself reading the book!” Well… it seems like you do. But it would still seem like that (/ be recorded as seeming like that) if there weren’t any reader. So the idea that we need to account for a self-contained locus of subjectivity is pure entity multiplication. It’s kind of like saying we don’t understand geography because no one can point to the horizon on a map.
Let’s not forget all of neuroscience, which is pretty far along in determining that consciousness is simply an emergent property of the complex physical activity of the brain. The evidence for this is very strong, and importantly nothing else is needed to explain consciousness. Anything beyond that is dualism, and dualism is mysticism full stop. There’s room for debate on the exact nature of the physical processes necessary for consciousness- they may be quantum, or the macro-scale electrochemical stuff may be enough. But nothing beyond that is necessary, nor is their evidence for anything approaching dualism.
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References? Emergent property, pretty far along? Consciousness studies and neuroscience are certainly making some progress in understanding aspects of brain functionality, but last time I checked, consciousness very much remains “the hard problem.”
What’s the difference then? At some point this seems a bit semantic, why can’t an “existence” be a “seeming”? Granted it’s possible that there could be a range of strictness to existential status, hard to discuss without clarifying though. (This train of thought reminds me a bit the experiments that generate headlines along the line of “We’ve Proven that Free Will is an Illusion …”, along with the implication that this purported illusory nature implies non-existence. One might just as well say that words are just illusion, “they’re really just ink on paper”, “illuminated squares”, or “variations in air pressure”, all “true” yet certainly not existentially extinguishing exhortations, (although having some of those around too might be handy in the case of zombies)).
(again possibly semantic problems). Alongside his relevant work on zombie psychology, one of the contributions from David Chalmers is this notion of the elimination method to resolve disputes if the point of contention is due to irreconcilable interpretations of a term.
What might might philosophers in the 15th century have seen if presented with a device like a Turing Machine - with separate levels of process instantiation. The 20th century gave us television and computer simulation and subsequent generations of media technology capable of state-machine like behavior and opened the arena of system dynamics as a discipline that parallels but doesn’t necessarily depend upon underlying physical processes. Maybe a system with complex enough enough feedback and adaptability will be able to have these same dilemmas, if it did - or didn’t, wonder what would that tell us.
You should consider looking at what Schrödinger said on the subject, most famously in his My View of the World, which actually opens with an argument to dismiss the duality applied to these different systems. Oppenheimer was quite onboard as well, so was Tesla. David Bohm. In fact, there’s a long history of some of science’s leading minds, making very direct connections between what they were finding experimentally, and these “mystic traditions.” This drove much of their work and seems to have provided quite a lot of inspiration – the “hypotheses” which must include creativity, epiphany, and intuition, in order to keep science moving forward. They don’t tend to make the argument that they are specially-qualified to answer these questions, because they are physicists, in my own research. In fact, what they are saying is that maybe these things have already been answered, and science is starting to make experimental observations that confirm these existing perspectives.
I agree with your point about the perhaps undeserved “special status” sometimes given to physicists by some parties, when it comes to waxing philosophical/metaphysical on the nature of Self, the universe, why there is something and not nothing (which I think I finally figured out is the wrong question in metaphysics, due to ideas contained within that are perhaps inherently limiting). Artists, poets, writers, lovers, adventurers, mystics themselves, and so many others have probably charted quite a bit more useful territory in these realms, at this point. Science is, if anything, playing catch-up.
Still, it’s a useful thing. I think perhaps what you’re really saying is, you don’t value more metaphysical/philosophical/“mystic” explorations, especially when they cross paths with science and physics, something you feel should not get into that territory. Or at least that’s my read, I fully acknowledge this may be a misinterpretation on my part, and you are welcome to correct me, clarify, or not.
Whether or not (at the moment) I’m putting words in your mouth, I’d still submit that from what I have seen, absolutely nothing that science and physics have shown us in any way refutes “mystical” systems of knowledge that go back at least 5000 years, if not quite a bit longer. In fact, they weirdly seem to only confirm them. It’s not like the physicists are out-of-the-blue ascribing mystic qualities to their work – they’re realizing that their work is reflecting those other systems, and are surprised/shocked at the implications. I’m totally fine with them sharing these ideas – there’s quite a bit of my bookshelf dedicated to it.
There isn’t a difference – that’s my point – loosely speaking, there is no difference in kind between me thinking I exist and Batman thinking he exists. The question only matters because a lot of people start from the faulty premise that there is a difference, which gives us the whole “consciousness is terribly mysterious” industry.
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