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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“Basically, a quantum process, which is not simply chemical, it's using quantum mechanics in a very basic way. So you could start saying, oh, well, with photosynthesis is based on quantum mechanics, why not? Behavior of neurons and things like that. Maybe there's something which is a bit like photosynthesis in that respect. But what I'm saying is even more outrageous than that, because those things are talking about conventional quantum mechanics. Now, my argument says that conventional quantum mechanics, if you're just following the Schrodinger equation, that's still computable. You've got to go beyond that. So you've got to go to where Quantum mechanics goes wrong in a certain sense. You have to be a little bit careful about that because the way people do quantum mechanics is a sort of Mixture of two different processes”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, the key point. Sometimes people say It's because it's quantum mechanical It's not just that. It's more outrageous than that. You see, this is one reason I think we're so far off from it because we don't even know the physics right. You see, it's not just quantum mechanics. People say, oh, you know quantum systems and biological structures. No, well, you starting to see that some basic biological systems does depend on quantum... Look, in the first place, all of chemistry is quantum mechanics. People got used to that, so they don't count that. So he said, let's not count quantum chemistry. We sort of got the hang of that, they think. But you have quantum effects which are not just chemical. In photosynthesis, and this is one of the striking things in the last several years, that photosynthesis seems to be”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Partly it was the symmetry, because there is a feature of symmetry you can preserve quantum coherence much better with symmetrical structures. There is a good reason for that. And that impressed me a lot. I didn't know the difference between the A lattice and B lattice at that time, which could be important. Now that could even. That's an issue which isn't talked about much.”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just need to preserve certain degrees of freedom without them leaking into the environment. Once they leak into the environment, you're lost. So you've got to preserve these quantum states at a level which the state reduction process comes in, and that's where I think the non-computability comes in. It's the measurement process in quantum mechanics what's going on.”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the details of why he formed that view clear to me, but there's an interesting story. He keeps talking about. But I found this very exciting because I thought these structures, these little tubes which inhabit pretty well all cells. It's not just neurons. Apart from red blood cells, they inhabit pretty well all the other cells in the body. But they're not all the same kind. You get different kinds of microtubules. And the ones... Excited me the most. This may still not be totally clear, but the ones that excited me most were the ones, the only ones that I knew about at the time because they were Very, very symmetrical structures I had reason to believe that these very symmetrical structures would be much better at preserving a quantum state, quantum coherence, preserving the thing without”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Except he doesn't like calling to sleep because it's different. General anaes In a reversible way. So you want to make sure that they don't experience the pain that would otherwise be something that they feel. And consciousness is turned off for a while and it can be turned back on again. So it's crucial that you can turn it off and turn it on. And what do you do when you're doing that? What do general anesthetic gases do? See, he formed the view that it's the microtubules that they affect.”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You see, I was ignorant in what I'd read. I never came across them in the books I looked at. Perhaps I only read rather superficially, which is true. But I didn't know about microtubules. Stuart, I think one of the things he impressed him about them was when you see pictures of mitosis, that's a cell dividing. And you see all the chromosomes. And the chromosomes all get lined up and then they get pulled apart. And so as the cell divides, half the chromosomes go, whether they divide into the two parts, and they go two different ways. And what is it that's pulling them apart? Well, those are these little things called microtubules. And so he started to get interested in them. And he formed the view, well, his day job or night job or whatever you call it, is to put people asleep.”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have a rough road to me, and he said, I think you're missing something. Don't know about microtubules, do you? You didn't put it quite like that, but that was more or less it. And he said, this is what you really need to consider. So I thought, my God, yes, that's a much more promising structure.”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then you say, I thought, well, maybe this book will at least stimulate young people to do science or something. And I got all these letters from old retired people instead. He's the only people who had time to read my book. Except for Stuart Hammeroff.”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's not my perspective. So I thought I had to say it. And as I was writing my book, I thought, well, I don't really know anything about neurophysiology. What am I doing writing this book? So I started reading up about neurophysiology. And I wrote nothing. And I was trying to find out how it is that nerve signals could possibly preserve quantum coherence. And all I read is that the electrical signals which go along the nerves create effects through the brain. There's no chance you can isolate it. So this is hopeless. So I come to the end of the book and I'm more or less give up and just think of something which I didn't believe in. That's maybe this is a way around it. But no.”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, it was quite interesting because he got, he told me he'd got Carl Sagan, I think, to rise forward. There's a book, you see. So I thought, gosh, what am I going to do? I'm not going to get anywhere unless I get somebody”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they were talking about what computers could do, and they were entering a big room, they imagined entering this big room at the other end of the room, two computers were talking to each other. And as you walk up to the computers, they will have communicated to each other more ideas, concepts, things than the entire human race had ever commuted and done. I thought, well, I know where you're coming from, but I just don't believe you. There's something missing. So I thought, well, I should write my book. And so I did. It was at roughly the same time Stephen Hawking was writing his brief history of time.”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's going from there, you say. So I say I have no idea. So I wrote this book through my scientific career. I thought, you know, when I'm retired, I'll have enough time to write a sort of a popularish book. Which I will explain my ideas and puzzles, what I like beautiful things about physics and mathematics, and this puzzle about computability and consciousness and so on. And in the process of writing this book, well, I thought I'd do it when I was retired. I didn't actually. I didn't wait that long because Radio discussion between Edward Fredkin and Marvin Minsky.”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Imagine, it is a complicated story. So, you know, people think, oh, I'm drifting away from the point of something. But I think it is a complicated story. So what I'm trying to say, I mean, I try to put it in a nutshell, it's not so easy. I'm trying to say that whatever consciousness is, it's not a computation. It's not a physical process which can be described by computation.”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This Galileo principle that you can eliminate at least locally, you have to be in a small neighborhood because if you have people dropping rocks all around the world somewhere, you can't get rid of it all at once. But in the local neighborhood, you can eliminate the gravitational field by falling freely with it. And we now see that with astronauts, and they don't, you know, the Earth is right there. You can see the great globe of the Earth right beneath them. But they don't care about it. As far as they're concerned, there's no gravity. They fall freely in the gravitational field, and that gets rid of the gravitational field. And that's the principle of equivalence.”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So he understood that principle, but he couldn't make a theory out of it. Einstein came along, used exactly the same principle, and that's the basis of Einstein's general theory of relativity. There is a conflict. This is something I did much, much later, so this wasn't those days. Much, much later. You can see there is a basic conflict between the principle of superposition, the thing that Dirac was talking about, and the principle of general covariance. Well, principle of equivalence, gravitational fields equivalent to an acceleration.”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Eliminate the gravitational field. So you imagine Galileo dropping his big rock and his little rock from the leaning tower whether he actually ever did that or not. It's pretty irrelevant. And as the rocks fall to the ground, you have a little insect sitting on one of them looking at the other one. And it seems to think, oh, there's no gravity here. Of course it hits the ground and then it realizes something's different's going on. But when it's in free fall, the gravity has been eliminated. Galileo understood that very beautifully. He gives his wonderful examples of fireworks. And you see the fireworks and explode and you see the sphere of sparkling fireworks and it remains a sphere as it falls down as though there were no gravity.”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so I was trying to put all these things together and said, well, it's got to be the noncomputability comes in there. And I also can't quite remember when I thought this, but it's when gravity is involved in quantum mechanics. It's the combination of those two, and it's that point. When you have good reasons to believe, this came much later. But I have good reason to believe that the principles of general relativity and those of quantum mechanics, most particularly, it's the basic principle of equivalence which goes back to Galileo. If you fall freely.”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. Yeah, that's just the view I held that you need a theory and that. People call the reduction of the state or the collapse of the wave function, which you have to have otherwise quantum mechanics doesn't relate to the world we see. To make it relate to the world we see, you've got to break the Schrodinger equation. Schroeder himself was absolutely appalled by this idea, his own equation. I mean, that's why he introduced this famous Schrodinger's cat as a thought experiment. He's really saying, look, this is where my equation leads you into it. There's something wrong. Something we haven't understood, which is basically fundamental.”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's not part of quantum mechanics. There's something missing in the theory. The theory is incomplete. It's not just incomplete. It's in a certain sense not quite right. Because if you follow the equation, the basic equation of quantum mechanics, that's the Schrodinger equation, you could put that on a computer too. There are lots of difficulties about how many parameters you have to put in so on. That can be very tricky, but nevertheless it is a computational process. Modulo this question about the continuum as before, but it's not clear that makes any difference.”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he was talking about this, and my mind wandered. I don't remember what he said. All I can remember he's just moved on to the next topic, and something about energy he'd mentioned which I had no idea what had to do with anything, and so I'd been struck with this and worried about it ever since. It's probably just as well I didn't hear his explanation because it was probably one of these things to calm me down and not worry about it anymore. In my case, I've worried it about ever since. So I thought maybe that's the catch. There is something in quantum mechanics where these superpositions become one or the other.”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can get very, very close. Now, is that close enough? You see. And then I went to this course by Dirac. You see, I think it was the very first lecture that he gave. And he was talking about the superposition principle. And he said, if you have a particle, you usually think of particle can be over here or over there. But in quantum mechanics, it can be over here and over there at the same time. And you have these states which involve a superposition in some sense of different locations for that particle. And then he got out his piece of chalk. Some people say he broke it in two as a kind of illustration of how the piece of chalk might be over here and over there at the same time.”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I came to the view that that's probably not it. I might have to retract on that someday, but the view was no, you can get close enough. It's not altogether clear, I have to say. But you can get close enough. And, you know, I went to this course by Bondi on general relativity and I thought, well, you can put that on a computer. Of course, that was a long time before people, I've sort of grown up with this, how people have done better and better calculations and they could work out black holes and they can then work out how black holes can interact with each other, spow around and what kind of gravitational waves can out. And there's still a very impressive piece of computational work how you can actually work out the shapes of those signals. And now we have LIGO seeing these signals. And they say, yeah, those black hole spiral into each other. This is just a vindication of the power of computation in describing”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like to call myself a scientist, I suppose, but it means that Yes, well, you see, the question goes on here. So I began thinking okay, if consciousness or understanding is something which is not a computational process, what can it be? I knew enough from my undergraduate work, I knew about Newtonian mechanics, and I knew how basically you could put it on a computer. Is a fundamental issue which is it important or not? That computation depends upon discrete things, so you're using discrete elements, whereas the physical laws depend on the continuum. Now, is this something to do with it? Is it the fact that we use the continuum in our physics? And if we model our physical system, we use discrete systems like ordinary computers.”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I should go really back to the story, which in a sense I haven't finished because I went to these three courses, you see, when I was a graduate student. And so I started to think, well, I'm really, I'm a pretty what you might call a materialist in the sense of... Thinking that there's no kind of mystical something or other which comes in from who knows where.”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Reflection, yes. It's a bit hard to put your finger on, but there is something there which I think maybe could be unearthed at some point and see this is really what's going on why conscious beings have this advantage what it is that gives them advantage and I think it goes way back I don't think we talk about the hunting dogs and the elephants Pretty clear that octopuses have the same sort of quality and we call it consciousness. Yeah, I think so. I've seen enough examples of the way that they behave and that evolution root is completely different. Does it go way back to some common ancestor, or did it come separately?”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I could just lightly answer your question. You were asking me. What is it? There's something about sort of standing back and thinking about your own thought processes. I mean, there is something like that in the girdle thing because you're not following the rules. You're standing back and thinking about the rules. And so there is something that you might say you think about your doing something. And you think, what the hell am I doing? And you sort of stand back and think about what it is that's making you think such a way.”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, there's something going on. There's no clear connection with natural selection. Just some deep feeling going on there. We has to do with their conscious experience. And I think it's something that overall is advantageous, a natural selection, but not directly to do with natural selection.”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'm not saying it's biological because we don't know. Think other examples of elephants is a wonderful example too. This was, I think this was Attenborough one, where the elephants have to go from along the troop of them have to go long distances. And the leader of a troop is a female, they all are, apparently. And this female, she had to go all the way from one part of the country to another. And at a certain point, she made a detour. And they went off in this big detour. All the troop came with her, and this was where her sister had died. And there were her bones lying around, and they go and pick up the bones, and they hand it round and they caress the bones. And then they put them back and they will go back again. What the hell are they doing?”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the other group goes around and they start yelping at these. They don't bark, I guess, whatever noise hunting dogs do. The antelopes and they sort of round them up and they chase them in the direction of the river. And they're the other ones just waiting for them just to get because when they get to the river it slows them down. And so they pounce on them. So they've obviously planned this all out somehow. I have no idea how. And there is some element of conscious planning as far as I can see. I don't think it's just some kind of... So much of AI these days is done, or what are they called, bottom up systems? You have neural networks, and you give them a zillion different things to look at, and then they sort of... Can choose one thing over another just because it's seen so many examples.”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very hard question Certainly, I don't think it's primates. You see these pictures of African hunting dogs and how they can plan amongst themselves how to catch the antelopes. Some of these David Attenborough films, I think this probably was one of them. And you could see the hunting dogs. And they divide themselves into two groups, and they go in two routes, two different routes. One of them goes and they sort of hide next to the river.”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The undergrowth, you see. And in the distance, you see his cousins building growing crops, building shelters, domesticating animals. And in the slight foreground, you see they built a mammoth trap and this poor old mammoth is falling into a pit, you see, and all these people around them are about to grab him, you see. Well, you see, those are the ones who, the quality of understanding, which goes with all it's not just the mathematician doing his mathematics. This understanding quality is something else, which has been of tremendous advantage. To us, not just to us. See, I don't think consciousness is limited to humans”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some degree, but I don't often wondered about this, but there is something there which is very slippery. Something like standing back, and it's got to be something you see it's also got to be something which was of value to our remote ancestors. Because sometimes there's a cartoon which I drew sometimes showing you how all these in the foreground you see this mathematician just doing some mathematical theorem. There's a little bit of a joke in that theorem, but let's not go into that. He's trying to prove some theorem. And he's about to be eaten by a saber-toothed tiger who's hiding in the...”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. I've always concentrated on understanding. You know, people say people tell me how things were. What about creativity? That's something a machine can't do as creative. Well, I don't know. What is creativity? And I don't know. And, you know, somebody can put some funny things on a piece of paper and say that's creative and you could make a machine do that. Is it really creative? I don't know. You say, I worry about that one. I sort of agree with it in a sense, but it's so hard to do anything with that statement. But understanding, yes, you can. You can make go that understanding whatever it is. And it's very hard to put your finger on it. That's absolutely true.”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because you have understood them to be rules which only give you truth. There'd be no point in it otherwise. I mean, people say, well, okay, this is... One set of rules as good as any other, well, it's not true. You see, you have to understand what the rules mean. And why does that understanding of the mean give you something beyond the rules themselves? And that's what it was. That's what blew my mind. It somehow understanding why the rules give you truths enables you to transcend the rules.”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My god you can see that this statement is true it's as good as any proof because it only depends on your belief in the reliability of the proof procedure that's all it is and understanding that the coding is done correctly and it enables you to transcend that system Whatever system you have, as long as you can understand what it's doing and why you believe it only gives you truth, then you can see beyond that system. How do you see beyond it? What is it that enables you to transcend that system? Well, it's your understanding of what the system is actually saying and what the statement that you've constructed is actually saying. So it's this quality of understanding, whatever it is, which is not governed by rules. It's not a computational procedure”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Got to make sure that these rules are ones that you trust. If you follow the rules and it says it's a proof, is the result actually true? And your belief that it's true depends upon looking at the rules and understanding them. Now, what Gerdel shows is that if you have such a system Then you can construct a statement of the very kind that it's supposed to look at, a mathematical statement, and you can see by the way it's constructed and what it means that it's true what But not provable by the rules that you've been given. And it depends on your trust in the rules. Do you believe that the rules only give you truth? If you believe the rules only give you truth, then you believe this other statement is also true. I found this absolutely mind-blowing when I saw this, it blew my mind.”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You see, is this any good if you've got an algorithmic system which claims to say, yes, this is right, you've proved it correctly, this is true. If you've proved it, if you made a mistake, it doesn't say it's true or false, but if you've done it right, then the conclusion you've come to is correct. Now you say, why do you believe it's correct? Because you've looked at the rules and you said, well, okay, that one's all right. Yeah, that one's all right. What about that? I'm not sure. Oh, yeah, I see. I see why it's all right. Okay. You go through all the rules. You say, yes, following those rules, if it says, yes, it's true, it is true.”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was basically, and he phrased it in a way which often people didn't, and if you read Douglasoff's status book, he doesn't, you see. But Steen made it very clear, and also in a sort of public lecture that he gave to a mathematical, I think maybe the Adams Society, one of the mathematical undergraduate societies, and he made this point again very clearly, that if you've got a formal system of proof, so suppose what you mean by proof is something which you could check with a computer. So to say whether you've got it right or not, you've got a lot of steps, have you carried this computational procedure following the proof, steps of the proof correctly, that can be checked by an algorithm, by a computer. The key thing now”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was introduced to it in detail by the course by Steen. And he, it was two things he described which were very fundamental to my understanding. One was Turing machines. And the whole idea of computability and all that. So that was all very much part of the course. The other one was the Girdle theorem. And it wasn't what I was afraid it was to tell you there were things in mathematics you couldn't prove.”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it was. And I was interested, I got particularly interested in. Three lecture courses that were nothing to do with what I was supposed to be doing. One was a course by Herman Bondi on Einstein's general theory of relativity, which was a beautiful course, he was an amazing lecturer, brought these things alive, absolutely. Another was a course on quantum mechanics, given by the great physicist Paul Dirac. Very beautiful course in a completely different way. He was very kind of organized and Never got excited about anything seemingly. But it was extremely well put together and I found that amazing too. Third course that was nothing to do with what I should be doing was a course on mathematical logic. As I say, my discussions with Ian Percival.”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Consciousness. Sure. The idea is basically ideas which I formulated in my first year as a graduate student in Cambridge. I did my undergraduate work in mathematics in London and I had a colleague Ian Percival used to discuss things like computational logical systems quite a lot. I'd heard about Girdle's theorem. I was a bit worried by the idea that it seemed to say there were things in mathematics that you could never prove. And so when I went to Cambridge as a graduate student I went to various courses. See, I was doing pure mathematics. I was doing algebraic geometry of a sort, a little bit different from what my supervisor and people did.”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You've got a notion which is an absolute notion, this notion of computability, and you can add Mathematical problems are computably solvable and what aren't. It's a very beautiful area of mathematics and it's a very powerful area of mathematics and it underlies the whole sort of The principles of Computing machines that we have today”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There were all sorts of sub-programs and subroutines and all the, I mean, I learned a little bit of computing when I was a student, but not very much. But it was enough to get the general ideas.”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And one of the wonderful things that Turing did was to show that you could have what we call a universal Turing machine. You just have to have a certain finite device. Okay, it has to have an unlimited storage space, which is accessible to it. But the actual computation, if you like, is performed by this one universal device. And so the view comes away, well, you have this universal Turing machine, and maybe the brain is something like that, a universal Turing machine, and it's got maybe not an unlimited storage, but a huge Storage accessible to it. And this model is one, which is what's used in ordinary computation. It's a very powerful model. And the universalness of computation is very useful. You can have some problem and you may not see immediately how to put it onto a computer, but If it is something of that nature, then”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have this wonderful thing about and girdle and church and carry and various people, particularly touring, and I guess post was the other one, these people who develop the idea of what a computation is. And there were different ideas of what a computer developed differently. I mean, church's way of doing it was very different from Turing's. But then they were shown to be equivalent. And so the view emerged that what we mean by computation A very clear concept.”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And sort of opposite each other rather than being connected by it's not as though you've got electrical circuits. There's something else going on there. So it's just the idea that it's like a complicated computer just seems to me to be. completely missing the point. There must be a lot of computation going on, but the cerebellum seems to be much better at doing that than the cerebrum”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's the view that somehow it's computation. Which is producing the consciousness. And Here you have an incredible amount of computation going on. And as far as we know, it's completely unconscious. So why what's the difference? And I think it's an important thing. What's the difference? Why is the cerebrum got all this very peculiar stuff that very hard to see on a computational perspective, like having the everything have to cross over onto the other side and do something which looks completely inefficient? And you've got funny things like the frontal lobe and the whatever we call the lobes and the place where they come together. You have the Different parts the control you see, one to do with motor and the other to do with sensory.”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, you think of a tennis player or something, does that tennis player think exactly how to, which muscle should be moved in what direction and so on? No, of course not. But he or she will maybe think, well, if the ball is angled in such a way in that corner, that will be tricky for the opponent. The details of that are all done largely with the cerebellum. Where all the precise motions, but it's unconscious.”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Got more neurons, it's got more connections. Computationally, it's got much more going on from the cerebrum. But as far as we know, although it's slightly controversial, the cerebellum is entirely unconscious. So the actions, you have a pianist who plays incredible piece of music and think of, and he moves his little finger into this little key to get it hit it just the right moment. Does he or Consciously will that movement no? Okay, the consciousness is coming in. It's probably to do with a feeling of the piece of music that's being performed and that sort of thing which is going on. But the details of what's going on are controlled. I would think almost entirely by the cerebellum. Where you have this precision, the really detailed, once you”
2020-03-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source