YouSaid · the spoken record

Roger Penrose

lines on the record: 112
first: 2020-03-31
most recent: 2020-03-31
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“It's connected with all sorts. Yeah, I think these things are tied up in ways which are You see, I tend to think the mystery of consciousness is tied up with. Mystery of quantum mechanics and how it fits in with the classical world. And that's all to do with the mystery of complex numbers. And there are mysteries there which look like mathematical mysteries, but they seem to have a bearing on the way the physical world operates Scratching the surface, we have a long huge way to go before we really understand that.”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say, I think it's not a stupid question. I mean, there are some people, you know, many of my colleagues who are scientists, and they say, well, that's a stupid question, meaning when we just hear because things came together and produced life and so what? There's more to it, but what there is that's more to it? I have really much idea.”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“See, it's there already. You might think, what's it doing there? Okay, just a nice beautiful piece of mathematics. And then suddenly we see nope. It's the very crucial basis of quantum mechanics. And the way the world works.”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You like, you put one little thing in, you put square root of minus one in, and you get how much benefit out of it, all sorts of things that you'd never imagined before. And it's that amazing... Hiding there and putting that square root of minus 1”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going to have to say complex analysis. I might have said infinities. One of the most single idea, I think, was the fact that you can have infinities of different sizes and so on. That's in a way, I think, complex analysis. It's got so much magic in it. It's a very simple idea. take these you take numbers you take integers and then you fill them up Imagine you're trying to measure continuous line. And then you think of how you can solve equations. And what about x squared equals minus 1? There's no real number which has to satisfy that. So you have to think of a number called I. You think you invent it? Well, in a certain sense it's there already. But this number, when you add that square root of minus one to it, you have what's called the complex numbers. And they're an incredible system.”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How far away would you need to go before? I mean, I don't know, we have so little knowledge about that. We haven't seen any signals yet, but it's worth looking. It's worth looking. What I'm trying to say, here's another possible place where you might look. Now you're not looking at civilizations which got there first. You're looking at those civilizations which were so successful probably a lot more successful than we're likely to be by the looks of things which knew how to handle their own global warming or whatever it is and to get through it all and to live to a ripe old age in the sense of a civilization to the extent that they could harness signals that they could propagate through for some reason of their own desires whatever we wouldn't know to other civilizations which might be able to pick up the signals but what kind of signals would they be i haven't the foggiest”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know, it's speculation. I mean, the SETI program was a reasonable thing to do, but still speculation. It's trying to say, okay, maybe not too far away was a civilization which got there first. Before us, early enough that they could send our signals.”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And what I'm saying is that previous eon, there are signals coming through to us which we can see and which we do see. And these are both signals, the two main signals are to do with black holes. One of them is the collisions between black holes. And as they spiral into each other, they release a lot of energy in the form of gravitational waves. Those gravitational waves get through in a certain form into the next deon.”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I'm saying the other side of our Big Bang. Now I'm going back into the Big Bang, back, back. That was the remote future of a previous Eon.”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They get almost with the speed of light, okay, they begin to lose the mass too, for completely opposite reason, they lose the sense of scale as well. So my crazy idea is the Big Bang and a remote future, they seem completely different. One is extremely dense, extremely hot, the other's very, very rarefied and very, very cold. But if you squash one down by this conformal scaling, you get the other. So although they look and feel very different, they're really almost the same. The remote future, on the other side I'm claiming is that, where are the photons go? They go into the next big bang. Got to get your mind around that crazy idea”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You don't have a measure of the scale of space. You do have the structure, what's called the conformal structure. You see, it's what the angels and devils have. If you look at the eye of the devil, no matter how close to the boundary it is, it has the same shape. But it has a different size. So you can scale up and you can scale down, but you mustn't change the shape So it's basically the same idea but applied to space-time now. In the very remote future, you have things which don't measure the scale, but the shape, if you like, is still there. That's in the remote future. Now I'm going to do the exact opposite. Now I'm going to go way back into the Big Bang. Once you get there, things go hotter and hotter, denser and denser. What's the universe dominated by? Particles moving around almost with the speed of light.”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Other ones are even older than that, still 20th century, only just Max Planck E equals H new. New is a frequency. H is a constant again like C. E is energy. Energy and frequency are equivalent. The two together Energy and Mass are equivalent Einstein, energy and frequency equivalent Max Planck, put the two together mass and frequency are equivalent. Absolutely basic physical principle. If you have a massive entity, a massive particle, it is a clock with a very, very precise frequency. Not you can't directly use it, you have to scale it down so your atomic and nucleo clocks, but that's the basic principle. You scale it down to something you can actually perceive. But it's the same principle. If you have mass, you have beautiful clocks. But the other side of that coin is if you don't have mass, you don't have clocks.”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They need to go somewhere because from their perspective, infinity is just another place. This is a difficult idea to get your mind around, so that's why one of the reasons cosmologists are finding a lot of trouble taking me seriously. But to me, it's not such a wild idea. What's on the other side of that infinity? You have to think, why am I allowed to think of this? Because photons don't have any mass. And we in physics have beautiful ways of measuring time. There are incredibly precise clocks, atomic and nuclear clocks, unbelievably precise. Why are they so precise? Because of the two most famous equations of twentieth century physics. One of them is Einstein's E equals MC squared. What's that tell us? Energy and mass are equivalent.”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he thinks that's a very nice thing. I try and represent this infinity to this kind of geometry. So it's not quite Euclidean geometry, it's a bit like it, that the angels and the devils inhabit. And their infinity, by this nice transformation, you squash their infinity down so you can draw it as this nice circle boundary to there universe. Now from our outside perspective we can see their infinity as this boundary. What I'm saying is that it's very like that. The infinity that we might experience like those angels and devils in their world can be thought of as a boundary. Now I found this a very useful way of talking about radiation, gravitational radiation and things like that It was a trick, mathematical trick. So now what I'm saying is that that mathematical trick becomes real, that somehow the photons are”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What it does in various places. You see, it's a thing that if you're not a mathematician, you think, oh, infinity, I can't think about that. Mathematicians think about affinity all the time. They get used to the idea and they just play around with different kinds of infinities and it becomes no problem. But you just have to take my word for it. Now one of the things is you see you take a Euclidean geometry. Well, it just keeps on keeps on keeps on going and it goes out to infinity. There's other kinds of geometry, and this is what's called hyperbolic geometry. It's a bit like Euclidean geometry, it's a little bit different. It's like what Escher was trying to describe in his angels and devils. And he learned about this from Coxeter.”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is this beautiful series of pictures by the Dutch artist MC Escher? You may know them, the ones called Circle Limits. They're the very famous one with the angels and the devils, and you can see them crowding and crowding and crowding up to the edge. Now the kind of geometry that these angels and devils inhabit, that's their infinity. But from our perspective, infinity is just a place. Okay, it's...”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who's going to be bored by this universe? Not us. We won't be around. It'll be mostly photons running around. And what do photons do? They don't get bored because it's a part of relativity, you see. It's not really that they don't experience anything. That's not the point. Photons get right out to infinity without experience any time. It's the way your relativity works. And this was part of what I used to do in my old days when I was looking gravitational radiation and how things behaved at infinity. Infinity is just like another place. You can squash it down as long as you don't have any mass in the world. Infinity is just another place. The photons get there. The gravitons get there. What do they get? They've run to infinity. They say well now I'm here what way? There's something on the other side, is there? The usual view it's just a mathematical notion. There's nothing on the other side, that's just the boundary of it.”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With a pop at the end. What could be more boring at that? It was boring then. Now this is really boring. There's nothing like even black holes. Universe gets colder and colder and colder and colder. And I thought, this is very, very boring. Now that's not science, is it? But it's emotional.”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this universe is expanding and expanding. What's going to happen in the future? Well, it gets more and more boring for a while. What's the most interesting thing in the universe? Well, this black holes. The black holes more or less gulp down, entire clusters of galaxies. At class, it'll swallow up most of our galaxy. We will run into the Andromeda galaxies, black hole, that black hole will swallow our one, they'll get bigger and bigger, and they'll basically swallow up. The whole cluster of galaxies, gulp it all down, pretty well all most of it, maybe not all. Most of it. Okay, then that'll happen. There'll be just these black holes around. Pretty boring, but still not as boring as it's going to get. It's going to get more boring because these black holes, you wait, you wait, and you wait and you wait and wait an unbelievable length of time. And Hawkings black hole evaporation starts to come in. And the black holes, you just, it's incredibly tedious. Finally evaporate away. Each one goes away.”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it seems to be a feature of this term that Einstein introduced into his cosmology for the wrong reason. He wanted a universe that was static. He put this new term into his cosmology to make it make sense. It's called the cosmological constant. And then when he got convinced that the universe had a Big Bang, he retracted it, complaining this was his greatest blunder. The trouble is it wasn't a blunder. It was actually right. Very ironic. And so the universe seems to be behaving with this cosmological constant. Okay.”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I was just thinking to myself, how boring this universe is going to be? You've got this exponential expansion. This was discovered early in this century 21st century. People discovered that these supernova exploding stars showed that the universe is actually undergoing this exponential expansion. So it's a self-similar expansion.”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes Inflation is supposed to stretch it out and make it all uniform, you see. It doesn't do it because it can only do it if it's uniform already at the beginning. You just have to look at it. I can't go into the details, but it doesn't solve it. And it was completely clear to me it doesn't solve it.”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what I'm saying is that there's a huge puzzle. Why was gravity in this very low entropy state, very high organized state, everything else was all random? And that to me was the biggest problem in cosmology. The biggest problem Nobody seemed to even worry about it. People say they solved all the problems and they don't even worry about it. They think inflation solves it. It doesn't. It can't. Because”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so people, why don't cosmologists worry about this? So I worried about it. And then I thought, well, it's not really a paradox because. Looking at matter and radiation at a maximum entropy state, what you're not seeing directly in that is the gravitation. It's gravitation which is not thermalized. The gravitation was very, very low entropy. And its low entropy by the uniformity, and you see that in the microwave too. It's very uniform over the whole sky. I'm compressing a long story into a very short few sentences”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is what's called the Planck spectrum of frequencies, different intensities for different frequencies. And it's this wonderful curve due to Max Planck. And what's it telling you? It's telling you that the entropy is a maximum. Started off at a maximum, and it's going up ever since. I call that the mammoth in the room. I mean, this is a paradox.”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You see, the thing is that I formed my model for reasons which are very fundamental, if you like. It has to do with this very fundamental principle, which is known as the second law of thermodynamics. The second law of thermodynamics says more or less things get more and more random as time goes on. Another way of saying exactly the same thing is things get less and less random as things go back. As you go back in time, they get less and less random. So you go back and back and back and back. And the earliest thing you can directly see is this microwave background. What's one of the most striking features of it is that it's random. It has this what you call this spectrum of”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Except for one little thing, which is this thing called inflation, which people had to put into it to make it work. When I first heard of it, I didn't like it at all. Inflation is that in the first I am going to give you a very tiny number. Think of a second. That's not very long. Now I'm going to give you a fraction of a second. 1 over a number. This number has 32 digits. Well, let's say between 36 and 32 digits tiny, tiny time between those two tiny ridiculous seconds, fraction of a second, the universe was supposed to have expanded in this exponential way, an enormous way for no apparent reason you had to invent a particular thing called the inflaton field to make it do it. And I thought this is completely crazy. There are reasons why people stuck with this idea.”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cats, right? Yes, it's like sort of got picked up on, whereas it wasn't his intention originally. But then the evidence piled up and piled up. And one of my friends, I learned a lot from when I was in Cambridge, just Dennis Sharmer. He was a great proponent of steady state. And then he got converted. He said, no, I'm sorry. I had a great respect for him. He went around lecturing, said I was wrong. This steady state model doesn't work. There was this big bang. And this microwave background that you see, Okay, it's not actually quite the Big Bang when I said not quite. It's about 380,000 years after the Big Bang. But that's what you see. But then you have to have had this Big Bang before it in order to make the equations work. And it works beautifully.”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Primordial atom is what he called it, yes. And then it became, well, Fred Hoyle used the term Big Bang in a kind of derogatory sense. He said, well, didn't you?”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which was there all the time, and he had a model which was there all the time. But then there was this discovery, accidental discovery, very important discovery, of this microwave background. And if there's the crackle on your television screen, which is already sensing this microwave background, which is coming at us from all directions. And you can trace it back and back and back and back. And it came from a very early stage of the universe. Well, it's part of the Big Bang theory. The Big Bang theory was when people tried to solve Einstein's equations. They really found you had to have this initial state in the universe. It was used to be called the primordial atom and things like this. This freedman and Lemaitre. Was a Russian, I met her, it was a Belgian, and they independently, well, basically Friedman first. Lemetra talked about the”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, just as a matter of terminology, I don't like to call it another universe, because when you have another universe, you think of it kind of quite separate from us. But these things, they're not separate. Now the Big Bang conventional theory. You see, I was actually brought up in the sense of when I started getting interested in cosmology, there was a thing called the steady state model, which was sort of philosophically very interesting, and there wasn't a big bang in that theory, that somehow new material was created all the time in the form of hydrogen and the universe kept on expanding, expanding, expanding, and there was room for more hydrogen. It was a rather philosophically nice picture. It was disproved when the Big Bang, well, when I say the Big Bang, this was theoretically discovered by people trying to solve Einstein's equations and apply it to cosmology. Einstein didn't like the idea he liked a unit.”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“like a sound to a yeah that's right you get colors and sounds mixed up And that sort of thing. I mean, an interesting subject.”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's the girdle theorem, things like that. But what does it mean to be perceive the color blue or something? I mean, I'm foggiest. It's a much more difficult question. I mean, is it the same if I see a color blue and you see it, if you're sampling with this condition, what's it called”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, you see, as a mathematician, I don't know how to define any of them, but at least I can point to the connections. So the idea is intelligence is something which I believe Needs understanding, otherwise, you wouldn't say it's really intelligence, and understanding needs awareness. Otherwise, you wouldn't really say it's understanding. Do you say of an entity that understands something? And unless it's really aware of it, in our normal usage. So there's a three sort of awareness, understanding, and intelligence. And I just tend to concentrate on understanding because that's where I can say something.”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, but you see, I tend to say you have understanding and intelligence and awareness. And somehow Understanding is in the middle of it, you see. Like to say, could you say of an entity that is actually intelligent if it doesn't have the quality of understanding? I'm using terms I don't even know how to define. Who cares? I'm just”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think at the moment that's the thing we happily put the word orc down there to say orchestrated. Even more unclear what that really means.”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's the thing which when organized together, that's the OR part in ork OR, but the orc part, the OR part at least one can see where one's driving as a theory. You can say it's the... Quantum choice of going this way or that way. But the orc part, which is the orchestration of this, is much more mysterious. And how does the brain somehow orchestrate all these individual OR processes into a genuine, genuine conscious experience?”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A row where consciousness is somehow actively reducing the state. My view is almost the exact opposite of that. It is the state reduces itself in some way which some non computational way which we don't understand, we don't have a proper theory of, and that is the building block of what consciousness is. So consciousness, it's the other way around. It depends on that choice which nature makes all the time when the state becomes one or the other rather than the superposition of one and the other and when that happens there is what we're saying now an element of proto-consciousness takes place proto-consciousness is roughly speaking the building block out of which actual consciousness is constructed so you have these proto-conscious elements which are when the state decides to do one thing or the other”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There has to be a process which is. You see, it's very curious the way the history has developed in quantum mechanics because very early on people thought there was something to do with consciousness, but it was almost the other way around. You see, you have to say the Schr ⁇ dinger equation says all these different alternatives happen all at once. And then when is it that only one of them happens? Well, one of the views, which was quite commonly held by a few distinguished quantum physicists, this when a conscious being looks at the system or becomes aware of it, and at that point it becomes one of the other.”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you see the controversial, we don't have a clear view which is accepted by a majority. I mean, you see people, most views are computational in one form or another. They think it's some, but it's not very clear, because even the IIT people who... Think of them as computational, but I've heard them say, no, consciousness is supposed to be not computational. I say, well, if it's not computational, what the hell is it? What's going on? What physical processes are going on which are that?”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Weren't many people taking it, but it's grown into one of the main viewpoints. There might be about four or five or six different views. Views that people hold, and it's wonderful. So it's considered as one of the possible. Lines of thinking, yes.”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, that is experimental. It's a very clear direction where you can think of experiments which could. Whether or not it's really microtubules which the anesthetic gases directly affect.”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not just an ordinary chemical process, there's something quite different about it. And one of the main candidates is that the anesthetic gases do affect directly microtubules. And how strong that evidence is, I wouldn't be in a position to say. But I think there is fairly impressive evidence”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there's a very serious area here, which is what Stuart Hammoroff is doing, and I think it's very important. One of the few places that you can really get a bit of a handle on what consciousness is, is what turns it off. And when you're thinking about general anesthetics, it's very specific. These things turn consciousness off. What the hell do they do? Well, Stewart and a number of people who work with him and others. Happen to believe that the general anaesthetics directly affect microtubules. And there is some evidence for this. I don't know how strong it is and how Watertight the cases, but I think there is some evidence pointing in that kind of direction.”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is in the very early days, isn't it? But I'm just making this point. You see, Stuart Hammeroff tends to be, oh, Penrose says that it's got to be a reduction of the state and so on. So let's use it. The trouble is Penrose doesn't say that. Penrose says, well, I think that. We have no experiments as yet. Which shows There are experiments which are being thought through and which I am hoping will be performed. There is an experiment which is being developed by Dirk Baumister, who I've known for a long time, who shares his time between Leiden in the Netherlands and Santa Barbara and the US, and he's been working on an experiment which could perhaps demonstrate That quantum mechanics, as we now understand it, if you don't bring in the gravitational effects, Has to be modified”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. No, you were stuck. Don't have a theory. That's the trouble. So this is a big problem. If you say, okay, well, what's the theory? I don't know.”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You see, quantum gravity is already not this. Because when you say quantum gravity, what you really mean is quantum mechanics applied to gravitational theory. So you say, let's take this wonderful formalism of quantum mechanics and make gravity fit into it. So that is what quantum gravity is meant to be. Now I'm saying you've got to be more even-handed, that gravity affects the structure of quantum mechanics too. It's not just you quantize gravity. You've got to gravitize quantum mechanics. And it's a two-way thing.”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Happen to be one of the kinds of people. There is a whole group of people they're all considered to be a bit mavericks who believe that quantum mechanics needs to be modified. There's a small minority of those people, which are already a minority, who think that the way in which it's modified has to be with gravity. And there's an even smaller minority of those people who think it's the particular way that I think it is.”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Reduction of the state or the collapse of the wave function, or whatever it is. Something which has to be understood. It's not following the Schrodinger equation. It's not the way we conventionally do quantum mechanics. There's something more than that. It's easy to quote authority here because Einstein. Least three of the greatest physicists of the 20th century who were very fundamental in developing quantum mechanics, Einstein, one of them, Schrodinger another, Dirac another. You have to look carefully at Dirac's writings because he didn't tend to say this out loud very much because he was very cautious about what he said. You find the right place and you sees he says quantum mechanics is a provisional theory. We need something which explains the collapse of the wave function. We need to go beyond the theory we have now.”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of them is the Schrodinger Is an equation Schrodinger wrote down and it tells you how the state of a system evolves and it evolves according to this equation completely deterministic It involves into ridiculous situations. And this was what Schr ⁇ dinger was very much pointing out with his cat. He said you follow my equation, that's Schrodinger's equation, and you could say that you have to, your cat was just dead and alive at the same time. That would be the evolution of the Schr ⁇ dinger equation would lead to a state, which is the cat being dead and alive at the same time. And he's more or less saying this is an absurdity. Nowadays, say, Oh, well, Schrodinger said you can have a cat which is not that. You see, he was saying this is an absurdity. There's something missing. And that”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source