Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe | AI Podcast #85 with Lex Fridman

42 thoughts on “Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe | AI Podcast #85 with Lex Fridman”

1. I really enjoyed this conversation with Roger. Here's the outline:
   0:00 – Introduction
   3:51 – 2001: A Space Odyssey
   9:43 – Consciousness and computation
   23:45 – What does it mean to "understand"
   31:37 – What's missing in quantum mechanics?
   40:09 – Whatever consciousness is, it's not a computation
   44:13 – Source of consciousness in the human brain
   1:02:57 – Infinite cycles of big bangs
   1:22:05 – Most beautiful idea in mathematics

2. Such a joy.

3. I just love mr. Penrose. Thank you so much!

4. Excellent interview with a great thinker–so very interesting.

5. Subconscious actions/calculations ARE conscious. They are feelings. And consciousness is an emergent property. Just like this text is made of pixels, from a distance emerging as letters. Thats the same for all complex structures in the universe. The basics give a fundamental base for the more extravagant dances of life, such as your voice reading these words. I think that also gives rise to free will, once a system has become complex and emergent enough, it essentially breaks away from it's fundamental supporting mechanisms, and becomes its own thing, unbounded by the base mechanics that gave rise to it. Just like how parts of the universe have totally detached from its fundamental source and no longer interact.

6. This is my first Lex Fridman episode. That he can talk intelligently with Roger Penrose for an hour is enough reason for me to subscribe.

7. Lex holding his head at the part when Penrose is talking about infinity being a place is a whole mood

8. Can you get Ed Witten on?

9. this guy could use some

10. The block is a geometric shape
    From this shape we can show the geometric shape of the bone
    Thus showing the progression through combinatory ratioed spectro inversions how by geometric wave field creates matter
    And that the same structure for life and all matter lead to each other
    And thats full on

11. The difference between proof/algorithm and cognition is interactivity. Interactivity is what actually gets you 'functionally infinite' state space because the algorithm can interact with the real world, and all that limits the state-space of the real world is every particle within the event horizon of the actor. Even if you can prove the actor's part in that interaction, you don't necessarily understand why it's doing what it does because you haven't accounted for the huge variable of the entirety of the rest of the universe.

    This isn't a hard limitation; its a practical one. Our proofs, and our algorithms have to be small enough to be comprehensible by us. But that is more about our own limitations than any sort of fundamental limitations. This is why software engineering doesn't rely on mathematical proof by and large; the proofs would be too enormous for us to ever understand, which defeats the purpose. This is why cognition seems so 'other than computational' to penrose. It is an interactive system, not a neat little abstract problem.

    This is why mathematicians (like godel) often turn to god or spooky action at a distance when reasoning about the physical world. They fail to account for human limitations to mathematical modeling.

12. you talk way to much

13. A kind of control flow of interviews where each guest must make each stop without a specific entry point on a circuit between you, Rogan, Kuhn and Weinstein could be its own network, a new paradigm for peer review and this centuries Socratic dialogue for the future.

14. At 44 minutes in, Dr. Penrose I can assure you that the book encouraged many young people to pursue careers in science, myself included. Microtubules are, however, not the way to go.

15. If a computer becomes sufficiently complex, then consciousness may decide to occupy the computer, the same way consciousness occupies humans, and other complex life forms. From thousands of NDE's we know that consciousness leaves the body/mind at death of the body/mind. Consciousness does not emerge from the brain or advanced AI. Consciousness chooses to experience a virtual reality simulation as a human, etc.

16. My first fully awake thought this morning was that I didn't actually answer the "hard problem" of consciousness in my comment on Lex's podcast with Roger. Brain machinery such as microtubules aside (although supremely important to the question), I hypothesize it is the raw information itself subject to the laws of physics that is the primary energy or electrical current of consciousness, and the biological machinery serves as the instrument or resonator for this energy thus producing the amalgam of sensory experiences comprising lucidity. However the brain is capable of processing and storing raw signal so as to make the head appear invisible and the world vibrant is surely a hard problem concerning biological science, but as Nassim Haramein has said, "looking for consciousness in the brain is like looking for the announcer in a radio". Raw quantum signal enters into the brain through the various senses and from vital organs and hormonal systems already organized by nature into unique and electrically co-affecting wave functions. If the brain is thought of like a saxophone, the mixture of various raw signals inputted into the brain, no matter how novel, are all converted into the same breath, or the same sets of neurotransmitters, and the song played through the instrument is the arrangement of synaptic chemistry which represents the SUM quantum function of all data at any moment in time (facilitated by cookies stored in the hippocampus). The breath passes through the instrument in a way that makes coherent music possible because the instrument is sufficiently complex and well-tuned, but the information itself which is converted into breath is the source energy which holds the power to become the lucid conscious experience. Examples can best illustrate my point. Wearing a pair of colored sunglasses merely shifts the color spectrum, so that after a few minutes you begin to see the colors of the rainbow again. When the glasses come off you see for a few moments the make-up color that your brain generated to counter-balance the shift caused by the lenses. This tells us that the brain is more interested in the DIFFERENCE between frequencies of signal than in the specific unfiltered numerical values of the frequencies themselves, and that "the hard problem of color and sound" might have less to do with inherent qualities of the energy bandwidths our sense organs detect and more to do with inherent qualities of the mathematical differences between frequency values of similar wave functions. When it comes to color versus sound, the average person might not experience two lucid phenomena more distinctly. Sound is invisible yet rich to a degree that only the richness of color can serve as a fair metaphor, and color is terribly silent. But the nature of the ear and eye tell us everything about the difference between the experiences of their respective purposes. The ear employs a spiral to isolate 16,000 frequency ranges between 20 Hz and 20,000 Hz, while the eye is in the business of capturing snapshots of linear light beams prismatically divided by the cornea (correct me if I'm wrong) to be absorbed by cones only attuned to three different wavelengths "RGB". Thus, although sound and light are both transduced into the same electrochemical language for the brain, they enter the brain telling two different stories about the external world principally because the organs slice–let's call them arbitrary–continuum's up differently. Obviously these evolutionarily selected bandwidths are not arbitrary, but the point is the world outside the human brain WOULD be colorful and musical and display the features of lucid consciousness if only there were a prism to slice up the "objective world", or prisms plural which play nicely with each other. If you are interested in building a genuinely conscious robot that you can love as a friend, think about that robot and yourself as magical instruments that, tuned cleverly, are sensitive to and benefit from feedback without giving way to destructive resonance. Offloading memory-as-momentum-for-the-predicted-future via intelligent art-making is how I expect animals are capable of increasing their resonance in the world and utilizing it without them shattering into a million pieces. Oh wait, that's what our art is, isn't it! We are black holes, limits to light, to sound and to food, and consciousness in terms of self-awareness is the phenomena of feedback interactions of our holistic quantum wave function resonating in our present environment, which memory and paranormal thought tells us is not as spatially local as our leg muscles might think.

17. I only recently heard you on the Joe Rogan show, and didnt quite.know how to take you. This interview cleared things.up. anyone who recognizes Roger Penrose for his contributions to science as clearly as you deserves due credit. Subbed.

18. That cerebellum computation argument is Gold!

19. So essentially consciousness (intelligence, agency) is a collective of preserved quantum states within our neurons in their respective networks/locations? Maybe that explains why interrupting the system such as damaging/destroying the brain or suppressing microtubials can cause the entire quantum system to collapse, thus turning off consciousness for either a period of time or forever. We are conscious because the quantum states within our neurons in their particular configuration collectively make us conscious? I'm gonna need some more fungi to trip on and revisit this concept. Time for some good old neurogenesis. I need more neurons to better understand what's going on in my neurons, lol.

20. From a purely biological process, consciousness is just too damn useful for capping off processing of sensory data for survival. Which is why I'm fairly convinced that insects have it, say, not just mammals or whatever level you choose, via evolution of the structures that can create it. If you have enough biological complexity, consciousness is available as an awareness and survival tool at quite a low level, at least in our universe. Purely computational complexity, as in an algorithm running on a CPU does not, to my mind, equate to that potential for awareness. You need the physical structure to achieve this, be it microtubules, or whatever system coalesces into an interface or a process with the quantum physical world. Dammit, even trying to elucidate it in a way that doesn't sound nutty is hard.

21. One of my favorite geniuses ever.

22. This was a great interview! I've been interested in Roger and Stuarts ideas regarding the necessity of consciousness to arise from something other than computation, and microtubule structures being a great place to start. In this interview Roger clarified ideas such as consciousness collapsing the wave function vs. the natural collapsing being perceived by consciousness. Niels Bohr articulated this back in the day. Perhaps there is a dance, as Bohr also articulated that the opposite of a great truth is also true. He also got me interested in his big bang regression idea which I wasn't particularly read up on. Thanks for the great questions and the interview.

23. At 13:15, that weird movement in the background had me very confused until I realized it was a reflection in the window

24. This is brilliant!!!

25. My SOLUTION to the hard problem of consciousness: The degree of self-resonance in one's environment has everything to do with our interpolated continuity of self called existential conscious experience. The phenomenon of the self-aware mind can be simplified into two categories of experience: experiences pertaining to sensations inputted by the body and experiences pertaining to sensations inputted by the environment, to the brain. These categories are a vesica pisces, and the phenomena of thought is the intersecting region. Thought, being then some ongoing artistic unification of the body and the world by the brain, is by default: continuous insofar as the body and environment are continuous, and interpolated to the extent that the body and environment change. The objective of the brain is to maintain a high degree of stable resonance between itself and the heart as a person moves throughout the world. When a person spends too much time in an unfamiliar environment, self-awareness like a light begins to dim and the brain begins to signal the body to seek familiarity or to adapt itself to reflect the environment. Consciousness as a bright light could then be thought of as the illuminated eye at the top of the pyramid, and findings by the Blue Brain Project suggest individual thoughts do culminate as mathematical simplices in synaptic activity with peaks entangled up to 11 dimensions of iteration, in my understanding. Furthermore, in my non-expert understanding of HeartMath's research, the central cavity of the heart between the four chambers is said to carry the strongest gravitational singularity of the body produced like a standing eddy current by the electromagnetic currents generated by the heartbeat, and this singularity acts as a 6th sense via modular interactions with the electromagnetic fields of the hearts of other living creatures. Modulations in the heart singularity affect biorhythms and continuously alter the heart rate (heart rate variability) serving as a dynamic feedback loop between the person and their environment. From the quantum electromagnetic and gravitational scales of organ resonance (WiFi-like interactions) to the scale of linguistic social and self narratives in the face of cognated environments, architectures and social cues, the heart and brain are in the business of maximizing stable resonance with the environment in order to ensure the easiest route of passage for the body through the labyrinth of the world. As a result, self-aware consciousness dominates the existential experience because we are engineered to maximize it with our daily choices of clothing, food, the paths we take, the art we view, the places we visit, and the people we fall in love with.

26. My mind is experiencing a Big Bang right now

27. 13:40 – That's a kind of simplistic approach. Just because the cerebellum can't, or doesn't, speak through our mouth doesn't mean it's unconscious. There's no reason why multiple instances of consciousness can't exist throughout the body and there's no reason why we should expect them all to constantly declare their existence to the outside world. Mr Penrose is making a big assumption there, IMO.

28. When Lex went on Rogan, he became by top guest. Now Lex's Podcast is like a condensed list of my favorite Rogan podcasts. See you at 1m subs

29. You're like the Johnny Cash Show with the black suit against a black background. What was old is new again! Great look!

30. Please stray safe RP…we all appreciate you.

31. Love the format .. Thank you soo much for Penrose interview ..

32. With the computers and tech to come in the near future its impossible to think that humans cant travel or view the past

33. Who else is enamoured with an 88 year old scientific and mathematics giant who is completely comfortable using the phrase "blew my mind"?

34. here it is the channel doing its best to discredit actual science , buy introducing as an absolute fucking fruit cake in penrose

35. I think Orch-OR is the best description we have of a mechanism for consciousness. Hameroff deserves a Nobel prize.

36. Amazing podcasts Lex.. Keep it up !

37. Sir Roger Penrose is a hero of our time. Always a great interview.

38. When crazy people invented the science.

39. Wow to the whole interview. Wow to the Penroses pondering on the big bang and before. Explaining how infinity with lightwaves and adding two equations of Planck and Einstein with energi, mass and freqeuncy leads to lightwaves having no mass and no frequency enters infinity and " an new place". Just beautiful.

40. We can talk. Much of these discussions are heresy when it comes to actual science. However for an abstract subject like mathematics there is less harm in "dreaming". For a start mathematics is relatively cheap to do. However I stand by one fundamental point to this day, that much more effort needs to go into connecting the various STEM fields together. To this day you have theses being produced on some obscure results that in all likelihood won't ever be cited, or until the situation arises where the complete theory collapses and then the material discarded outright. This is completely useless. It shows misplaced priorities. There are also theories that seem patently wrong (in mostly Applied areas adopted from incomplete Pure ideas) and yet work is being pushed into these areas with a cult following. To be quite fair about it the pursuit of humanity's science is much more a subjective than an objective one. These notions of cults is the cancer in humanity's pursuit of the truth.

41. I wonder if we could assume that the period of inflation occurred before time? That only photons or pure energy existed with no mass. With no mass, there could be no time because there are no mass-frequency clocks that exist that can produce measurement or scale. In a sense "inflation" could be Penrose's idea that our universe eventually escapes its infinity to form a new universe. If / when our universe transitions to a no mass universe, due to black hole evaporation, time stops because mass no longer exists which leads to inflation and the birth of a new universe.

42. @01:10:07 is the craziest, most freakiest glitch sound I've ever heard.

Comments are closed.