Pot Pourri--Chance, Consciousness, AI, Fate, Free Will--Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Roger Penrose, Peter Lynds

Black swans. A black swan is an outlier, an event that lies beyond the realm of normal expectations. Most people expect all swans to be white because that's what their experience tells them; a black swan is by definition a surprise. Nevertheless, people tend to concoct explanations for them after the fact, which makes them appear more predictable, and less random, than they are. Our minds are designed to retain, for efficient storage, past information that fits into a compressed narrative. This distortion, called the hindsight bias, prevents us from adequately learning from the past.

Roger Penrose, Consciousness, and Wave Function Collapse

Roger Penrose, Consciousness, and Wave Function Collapse

Our everyday world of classical physics makes sense. If we drop a pebble in a pond it causes waves and sinks to the bottom. At the quantum level the pebble itself would not only initiate the action, but would become a wave. What happens at the borderland between classical physics and quantum physics? Why can we not connect the two in our understanding? On the one hand, we have a ball going where we toss it. On the other, we have balls "tossing" everywhere at once at the quantum level. Is something missing in the way we think?

Some physicists don't like such questions and prefer established investigation patterns, world paradigms which allow acceptable communication between community members. The eminent physicist and mathematician Roger Penrose is asking questions that are on the fringe. He says something is being overlooked in physics. We need a new way of understanding how the mind works. He lays out his ideas in Shadows of The Mind.

Artificial intelligence, or computing, is a current model for thinking about consciousness. Penrose regards it as inappropriate. Using Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, he argues that computational models of intelligence are inadequate to understand mind. Physics itself, says Penrose, is noncomputable. Even the most mathematically inclined people spend far less time than computers do in crunching numbers. Indeed, most of their insight come in leaps of intuition. With Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, Penrose argues that Alan Turing's Intelligence Machine* cannot do what people can. Computers will not know when to stop computing a noncomputable operation. The human mind will recognize when to stop. Penrose points out that a computer will continue its operations searching for an answer to Gödel's Theorem.

* ( Is this human/artificial intelligence test empirically irrelevant? That is, does it belong in the same category as Zeno's Paradox, which is empirically irrelevant? (See Brain in A Vat and Peter Lynds.) We know that despite what Zeno demonstrated, people in fact do reach end points. We also know that despite artificial intelligence theorists' arguments, machines do not demonstrate love, compassion, intuition, or longings for God, mystery, and deceased kin.)

Kurt Gödel aside, the big problem is wave function collapse, which occurs when a quantum event is measured. Penrose posits that the human mind itself is subject to wave function collapse and supposes that brain microtubules allow it. Microtubules are tiny enough to fit at the quantum level while neurons belong at the classical physics level. Within neurons, cytoskeletons form the structures that are the "glue" for cells. Inside them are microtubules, only 25 nanometers in diameter, which control synapse function.

In an interplay between the quantum cytoskeletal state and classical neurons, consciousness is manifested: anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff's findings support part of this description, but not Penrose's interpretation of it--that consciousness is manifested in the interplay.

When a human makes a quantum observation, wave function collapse occurs. Penrose assumes it results from human consciousness. Until the observation, the quanta are in a superposition of all possible states. (See Schrödinger's Cat, 2 January) Observation causes the quantum system to reduce (collapse) to a specific state.

Penrose argues that a corresponding collapse occurs in consciousness, and within certain microtubules. They self-collapse and each time they do, they correspond with a discrete consciousness event. Sequences of these events give rise to our sense of time,** and a stream of consciousness. Unlike computers, this collapse is non-algorithmic and is what separates us from machines. **(See Peter Lynds, Einstein, Time and "block" universe, 20 November--time as points rather than flow)

Perhaps most outrageous to the scientific community is that Penrose is led to believe in a Platonic scenario. With Plato, for every chair we sit on, its ideal counterpart exists metaphysically as a Platonic form.* For Penrose, conscious states exist in a world of their own, which our minds access. Unlike Plato, his world is physics rather than metaphysics. (Some of his opponents doubt this :-) *(See Julian Barbour here, here, and here.)

With the correspondence between wave function collapse in mind and the objects of mental observation, he seeks to rescue the world of macrophysics (in some instances like the common sense world we experience) and make it compatible with quantum physics. Einstein's gravitational world up to now has been undermined by Superposition Theory (See Schrödinger's Cat, 2 January). Penrose wants to resolve quantum paradoxes to make them "fit" with Einstein's view. He argues that it makes no sense to use the term "reality" for only objects we can see.

Penrose has enough stature that he can risk his reputation on this book, which many consider as wild-speculation. He follows a long line of risk takers, including Copernicus and Darwin. He has stirred up debate, which is good. This could also be science's future. In his last sentence, he says, "These are deep issues, and we are very far from explanations. I would argue that no clear answers will come forward unless the interrelating features of all these worlds [mental, physical, Platonic/mathematical] are seen to come into play. No one of these issues will be resolved in isolation from the others. I have referred to three worlds and the mysteries that relate one to another. No doubt there are not really three worlds but one, the true nature of which we do not even glimpse at present."

(Also see John Wheeler and delayed choice.)

Peter Lynds on The Physics of Time

Peter Lynds on The Physics of Time

Another, this one antique: How do you reach a goal? You cover half the distance, then half of that, then half of it. You keep halving your distance but always another half remains.

In fact, we do reach goals, but the above paradox has stumped philosophers for centuries. (Newton was able to predict the goal, but his calculations were inferred from a universe quantum physics undermines.) A 28 year old New Zealander and college drop out thinks he has an answer, and he has many physicists impressed with the boldness of his theory.

A tutor at a broadcasting school, Peter Lynds believes that his idea is quite simple and should have been recognized by other thinkers much earlier. Of course, he has uncommon sense. The problem has been with common sense, which gets in the way of understanding and has done so for centuries.

Peter Lynds believes that the mistake lies with thinking of time as a series of moments. From antiquity to the present, philosophers and physicists have assumed that objects in motion have determined positions at any instant in time. It's not true, Lynds says. In an interview with Astroseti.org, he says "People have wrongly assumed that an object in motion has a determined position at any instant in time, thus rendering the body's motion static at that instant and enabling the impossible situation of the paradoxes to be derived." One can infer from this that we believe in time because our brains are hard-wired for us to do so. Neurobiology.

Of course, the implication of his idea is that time has no flow as it would require progression through definite instants. If no progression, and no flow, then there is "freeze." We don't move, you and I. We are frozen in time.

This, too, seems paradoxical but reason offers at least one way out. There is no you or I, at least not in the usual, the common, sense. This requires exploration of one's own mind, as philosopher David Hume did, wherein he found no sufficient empirical evidence for the existence of a self. Of course, he was preceded in this by millennia of consciousness explorers from the Buddha and before.

In brief, can Lynds' theory make sense? Yes, but uncommon sense is required. After all, among the adults, a little boy pointed out that the emperor was naked.

The paradox is enhanced by the evidence of physics. Time does not seem to be inherent in nature, which, so to speak, has no need for it. Einstein's Special and General Theories have demonstrated that

a present moment, or "now," does not underlie physical processes.

judgments of simultaneity depend on position. Recall the relativity thought experiment in which (inside a train) a thrown ball reaches its target sooner for an outside observer than for a passenger on the train.

the mathematics of relativity suggests a block universe in which events don't occur but, rather, are mapped out in space-time so that nothing "happens" because all is rather like "here": one person's "here" (read: "now") may be a cafe on the Left Bank in Paris; another's might be an espresso house in North Beach, San Francisco. The "here"/"now" is "location" rather than "event." Events haven't happened in the "past"; don't happen in the "present"; nor will happen in the "future."

Albert Einstein: "There exists, therefore, for the individual, an I-time, or subjective time. This in itself is not measurable." Time as flow, as progress, is a product of our perceptions, our neurobiology, and has no basis in nature.

All of this is counter-intuitive. It defies common sense.

In its early days, physics wanted to separate the psychological from the evidentuary or traditionally theoretical. It finally accepts that these aspects are hopelessly intertwined. This takes me back to common vis a vis uncommon sense. All calculations, all theories, all experiments ensue from ways of seeing. If the emperor seems clothed, then he will be described thus. What do I mean? Henri Bergson said that time is merely a personal construct (read: psychological) that we force as fact.

I might as well end, then, on the psychological. Marcel Proust exquisitely explored his own psychology, to include how tea tasted in his childhood. I will close with part of a lovely passage, one that opens Swann's Way, of In Search of Lost Time (or Remembrance of Things Past, as I learned it):

"And as I would lay in bed, I would listen to the whistle of trains. At which point I would try to reckon the passage of time."