k-basinski / cool_stuff

This is a personal, curated list of links to stuff that I find interesting and relevant to my work.

Cool stuff

...about perception, cognition, neuroscience, psychology, physics, mathematics and whatever else I find cool and interesting.

This is a personal, curated list of links to stuff that I find interesting and relevant to my scientific work on auditory perception. If you have anything to add to this list for whatever reason, you're more than welcome to do a pull request. The point of this list is for me to have one place for all links to cool stuff that I come about (might as well share it with the world, right?).

Roger Penrose, consciousness, limits of computation and quantum mechanics

An interview with Penrose by Lex Fridman.

• He discusses the Gödel's theorems as setting limits of what kinds of faculties may be performed by computation. Based on this, he doesn't believe consciousness is a product of computation. It may arise from quantum processes in neurons, like those associated with microtubules (I'm personally totally unconvinced by this bit).
• A sidenote from myself: Alfred Tarski followed Gödel with Tarski's undefinability theorem that states that arithmetical truth cannot be defined in arithmetic. Crazy, right? Tarski was a member of Lwów-Warsaw school school BTW.
• There is a very profound statement about his general philosophy. He can be called a materialist but he has no idea what the material is. This is an repeating theme in the entire conversation. Although people make these distinctions between mental and physical, nobody is really sure what the physical is. We're only scratching the surface of the understanding of physics.
• One example is that quantum mechanics may be incomplete, especially the wave function collapse bit is problematic.
• A crazy idea which is a viable interpretation of quantum mechanics is the consciousness causes collapse interpretation, where consciousness is something that makes the quantum states determined (the quantum measurement). I hope I got that one right.
• The craziest thing is that if this is true, the Schrödinger's cat is dead or alive depending on the consciousness of the person who's looking. Sick.
• So, all in all, Penrose's view is that because consciousness is not a computational process, it perhaps is permeated by some sort of a non-Turing-machine thingy in the brain.
• An even crazier discussion about cosmology follows, with a convincing argument about cyclical universes and the idea of maximum entropy states (like after the black holes have eaten everything and then evaporated via Hawking radiation) being "kind of similar" to big bang states. Can't get my head around that though.