Josephson critique of Penrose's theory of quantum gravity & consciousnesss
From: Jack Sarfatti (sarfatti_at_pacbell.net)
Date: 08/04/04
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Date: Wed, 04 Aug 2004 22:55:55 GMT
I make some comments at the end. Brian and Roger are both Fellows of The
Royal Society and Brian has a Nobel Prize in physics. So this is a
Cambridge vs Oxford Debate of sorts not quite Beyond The Fringe but
definitely at the Jagged Edge. :-)
"Roger Penrose, The Large, the Small and the Human Mind (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997), 185 pages, £14.95 ISBN 0-521-56330-5
(hbk).
The Large, the Small and the Human Mind consists of Roger Penrose’s 1995
Tanner Lectures, together with commentaries by Abner Shimony, Nancy
Cartwright, and Stephen Hawking. Large parts of it are contained in his
previous books The Emperor’s New Mind and Shadows of the Mind (Penrose
1994), and the ideas have been discussed in a number of articles in this
journal, so they may be familiar to many readers, although some new
material is included. Penrose’s general claim is that there are a
number of situations that pose problems for current science, whose
resolution will demand the development of radically new theories. The
kinds of issues he addresses himself to are major ones: for example, the
degree of order of the cosmos, the relationship between mathematics and
the physical world, whether human mentality can be duplicated by a
computer, and whether there is a fundamental connection between quantum
mechanics and the human mind.
In the first chapter he uses a formula of Beckenstein and Hawking
concerning black holes to argue that the early universe ought to have
been highly disordered, a result inconsistent with the observed
uniformity of the cosmic background radiation. He rejects the standard
explanation for this uniformity based on the inflationary model of the
Big Bang claiming it to be invalid, and suggests that a more advanced
and as yet unformulated physical theory may resolve the problem. His
candidate for this role is quantum gravity, a theory that would combine
the two highly successful theories of the twentieth century, Einstein’s
theory of gravitation and the quantum theory, which have so far defied
attempts at integration, into a single whole. This unified theory might
explain the observed uniformity by imposing constraints on space-time
geometry. But the whole argument hinges on taking the
Beckenstein-Hawking formula out of the context in which it was
originally demonstrated, and it is far from obvious that it is valid to
do this.
Quantum gravity is additionally invoked to explain away the
‘Schrödinger’s cat paradox’. Under standard quantum theory, paradoxical
states are possible in which two seemingly inconsistent possibilities
are actualised simultaneously (in Schrödinger’s original exposition, a
cat being fully alive and at the same time dead). The fact that we do
not find such states in reality demands explanation. A number of
explanations, or rather perhaps ways of talking around the problem, have
been proposed, such as the many-worlds interpretation, the transactional
interpretation, the decoherence point of view, and spontaneous collapse
caused by additional terms in the Schrödinger equation: but none of
these has gained universal assent. Other proposals have implicated
consciousness or mind as the agent of wave function collapse, a
suggestion due originally to Eugene Wigner, and taken up more recently
by Henry Stapp (e.g. Stapp 1996), which may have some affinities at any
rate with the ‘Platonic world’ aspect of Penrose’s exposition which I
shall return to shortly, if not with the quantum gravity idea.
Penrose’s exploitation of quantum gravity to dispose of possibilities
such as a paradoxical ‘dead-alive mixture’ depends on a very tenuous
line of argument. Nature, he supposes, abhors indefiniteness regarding
space and time even more than it abhors superpositions of live and dead
cats (space and time are more real to Penrose than cats, perhaps?). In
Einsteinian gravitational theory, gravity is equivalent to a distortion
of space and time, so it is logical to invoke gravitational influences
as an agency that can prevent space and time getting unacceptably ‘out
of step’. The gravitational field of a cat turns out to be strong
enough for the task, but unfortunately, as in the case of the earlier
problem of accounting for the order of the cosmos, no proper
mathematical theory is as yet on offer. Hameroff and Penrose have
recently reviewed (Hameroff and Penrose 1996) their ‘Orchestrated
Objective Reduction’ (Orch OR) approach and made it clear again that
space-time is the thing that they consider special, but still without
giving reasons to justify this belief sufficient to satisfy people such
as this reviewer.
Penrose also discusses the by now familiar hypothesis of Hameroff and
himself that microtubules can become integrated into large scale
quantum computational systems, perhaps connected with consciousness.
Scepticism has been expressed as to the possible existence of such kinds
of system (e.g. Scott 1996), though the existence of SQUID rings where
the macroscopic and the quantum come into intimate contact as discussed
by Srivastava and Widom (1987) (in this type of system, superimposed
states of a macroscopic system involving only a few quanta are important
in determining the behaviour of the system), perhaps makes such
scepticism misplaced. We have here a perhaps familiar territorial
pattern, where it would seem that the biologist rejects proposals
implying that physics of a kind that he or she does not fully understand
may be important. The large amount of research being carried out at the
present time on quantum computation, some of which indicates (e.g.
Chuang et al. 1995) that this possibility is not necessarily damped out
by thermal fluctuations, suggests this is not an idea to be dismissed
too readily.
On a more cognitive level, The Large, the Small and the Human Mind
elaborates upon an idea touched upon in previous writings, involving
three worlds, physical, mental, and Platonic, arranged in a triangle
that depicts their mutual influence. The mental world, in accord with
conventional wisdom, is presumed to be dependent on something physical
such as the brain, while the Platonic world, concerned with universal
truths such as mathematical truth, is one to which our minds have
special access: we are supposed to be able to get at such truths because
they are in some sense ‘out there’ for us to get at. In its turn, the
Platonic world, in the light of the striking way in which the physical
world conforms to mathematical description, is regarded as the source of
the physical.
Non-locality (the idea that some influences act at a distance), and
non-computability (that some physical processes cannot be computed by a
finite computer program) enter into this equation as well. The
predictions of quantum mechanics, as shown by John Bell, cannot be
accounted for by models where there is no action at a distance while,
correspondingly, it seems impossible to localise conscious experience in
any one place; and so it is natural to imagine that the two might be
connected. And, according to Penrose, mathematical thought cannot be
reproduced by a computer program, and so must involve some special
physics. Quantum gravity comes in as a candidate for such physics since
one attempt to produce such a theory, the Geroch-Hartle scheme, involves
classifications which are ‘non-computable’. As an added bonus, the same
process which it is suggested might prevent mixtures of dead and alive
cats from being realised in nature could prevent our conscious minds
being overwhelmed by vast numbers of ideas at the same time.
It requires considerable optimism to speculate that in due course all
these ideas will come together, resulting in a theory which will not
only unite quantum theory and gravity but also resolve the problem of
incompatible combinations of possibilities, as well as including the
subtleties of the mind within its scope, although such is the pace of
developments in fundamental physics that one cannot rule out such
possibilities altogether. However, many scientists see Penrose’s
problems as being really non-problems, whilst others have proposed
alternative ways of overcoming some of the difficulties. It is unclear
in any case that one needs to go to quantum gravity to find
non-computability. Non-computability in some sense already arises in
what are known as chaotic systems, a point I shall return to later.
In any event, there appears to be widespread agreement among specialists
in modelling the mind that Penrose’s arguments for the non-computability
of mental processes, based on Gödel’s theorem, are misconceived. What
these arguments actually disprove is one version of mind model, namely a
piece of code that could be run on a computer to give the correct answer
to any mathematical question. To treat the question in such terms is to
ignore a distinction made many years ago by David Marr, between a theory
of how a process is executed, and a corresponding computer simulation.
These two entities may differ from each other in various ways, one being
that in general a real computer program only approximates to the
idealisation to which the theory refers. A theory of how we acquire
mathematical skills might be based on the way networks of neurons can be
trained to perform particular skills, and might be correct in the limit
of an infinitely large neural network, but only approximate for any
finite computer simulation. The Gödel-Turing type arguments that
Penrose uses presume a system that has both a finite specification and
perfect abilities, and thus simply cannot be applied to that kind of
situation.
Neither is the attempt to defend Penrose’s ideas against such criticisms
(in particular those of Grush and Churchland (1995)), made in a recent
article by Penrose and Hameroff (1995) especially convincing. What
follows their remark ‘it may be helpful to clarify the issue’ can be
classified as clarification only with difficulty, since the argument can
be followed only by looking concurrently at the Penrose and Hameroff
defence, the Grush and Churchland article, and Shadows of the Mind. In
the end, all that Penrose and Hameroff seem able to come up with is a
statement asserting in effect that ‘correct mathematical reasoning’ (to
be construed as ordinary mathematical proof, according to the
clarification) cannot be encapsulated in any formal system that is
‘acceptable to mathematicians as ... reliable ...’. But supposing one
adopts the point of view that the capacity to perform ordinary
mathematical proof is the outcome of a process of familiarisation with
particular ideas where one’s initial difficulties with the ideas evolve
to familiarity with them, and then to confidence in the correctness in
the arguments that others use, till eventually one uses them confidently
oneself. With such a scenario in mind one would be in error to consider
any formal system which captured the processes one had learnt to accept
as valid as being totally reliable. But taking as valid this
potentially erroneous step, regarding it as ‘correct in principle’ (see
p.104 of Shadows of the Mind), seems to be just what Penrose and
Hameroff are trying to force upon us.
But there may be another twist to the story. How actually do we come to
understand abstract mathematical concepts such as continuity or
infinity? Do we come across approximations to them, apply a process of
abstraction to them as a result of some brain circuitry, and then learn
rules which we become confident at applying, more or less the story
suggested above? Or do the approximate realisations point us instead
towards their ideal equivalents in a Platonic realm which then becomes
the arena of our thinking, as Penrose or Gödel would probably claim?
Penrose may be correct after all, but not on the basis of the arguments
given in his writings. Would this postulate be just philosophy, or
something more? I suggest it would, or could, be science. The Platonic
realm would have its own characteristic laws which we could explore and
systematically test, and concerning which we could make mathematical
theories. Non-computability in the sense of Turing (as utilised by
Penrose) may fit naturally into such a scheme, since if the Platonic
realm is in some sense eternal then it may instantiate the outcome of
‘infinite computations’ rather then ordinary finite ones, and in virtue
of this feature genuinely provide a source of mathematical truth, to the
extent that it can be accessed by human beings.
The rational nature of mathematical thought may make it difficult to
rule out explanations for it along conventional lines. Might the case
be easier to make for the case of musical intuition? Some years ago I
had an opportunity to explore this question in collaboration with an
expert on the structure of music (Josephson and Carpenter 1996). We
examined the theories of musical perception proposed by cognitive
scientists, and concluded that they addressed themselves only to the
more superficial aspects of music, equivalent to the question of
grammaticality in language, or that they address themselves to musical
connotations acquired by association, a model that does not seem to
apply to kinds of music that are listened to for themselves rather than
being listened to in a particular context of activity. Such theories do
not address the more aesthetic aspects of music, or elucidate those
features which distinguish a potent ‘musical idea’ from more random
patterns of sound. We argued that these have a significance beyond that
which can be explained on cultural or genetic grounds. Perhaps, then,
the understanding of these aspects of music is to be found in some kind
of transpersonal or Platonic realm where music is a symbolism that is
capable of evoking knowledge of an archetypal character (Josephson 1995).
The non-computability concept discussed by Penrose could also be of
value, perhaps in a modified form, even if the arguments presently used
to support it are flawed. For example, chaos theory tells us that real
systems may sometimes behave in a way that transcends analysis, because
we cannot specify their states with sufficient accuracy to be able to do
a definitive analysis. Biological systems might be instances of systems
of this type. This idea dates back to Niels Bohr, who was later
persuaded by Delbruck that it was ridiculous (the familiar territorial
pattern again?). The idea is in fact not unreasonable and holds up under
close examination (Josephson 1988). Penrose’s concept of a Platonic
mind, with capabilities beyond those fitting into conventional models,
can be viewed as a contribution to this tradition.
One might conclude from such considerations that Penrose may be right to
emphasise creativity, non-computability, and the Platonic realm, but
perhaps wrong to look for the integrative factor within his own
discipline of quantum gravity. The most crucial element may be
creativity. In the physical realm, creativity shows itself only in the
minimalist guise of ‘random fluctuations’. My collaborator Fotini
Pallikari-Viras and I have argued (Josephson and Pallikari-Viras 1991)
that fluctuations have their systematic elements as well as random ones,
and that biological organisms may evolve or develop to make creative use
of them. It has proved difficult to put such ideas into mathematical
form, but this is perhaps an area where significant new concepts can be
developed.
Of the three concluding commentaries, that by Shimony is perhaps of the
most interest. He argues for a juxtaposition of Whiteheadian
philosophy, where mentality and potentiality play a fundamental role,
and quantum physics. Physicists have developed, within the ontology of
particles and fields, the framework of quantum mechanics which contains
abstract concepts such as state, observable, superposition, and
entanglement. His proposal is that similar concepts be applied to other
kinds of ontology such as those of minds, or entities endowed with a
‘protomentality’. This activity might lead to a ‘quantum psychology’ in
which it could be the case that (in line with Stapp’s proposals) a
developed mentality might resolve the Schrödinger cat paradox. Nancy
Cartwright also puts the case for going beyond physics in one’s
thinking, while Stephen Hawking, once a collaborator of Penrose’s, in
his commentary ‘Objections of an Unashamed Reductionist’, makes strong
objections to a number of Penrose’s claims.
Penrose’s books are ones that most readers either considerably like or
considerably dislike. Ideas are presented at a great rate, but are very
speculative, and justified by tenuous and sometimes doubtful arguments.
The book was transcribed from a recording of the original talks, with
little attempt being made to improve the clarity of the arguments by
rewriting, as a result of which following the arguments will prove a
considerable challenge for the non-expert, and possibly problematic even
for the expert. Nevertheless, it remains a very interesting and
stimulating contribution.
References
Chuang, I.L., LaFlamme, R., Shor, P.W., and Zurek, W.H., ‘Quantum
computers, factoring, and decoherence’, Science 270(5242), pp. 1633–1635.
Grush, R. and Churchland, P.S. (1995), ‘Gaps in Penrose’s Toiling’,
Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2(1), pp. 10–29.
Hameroff, S. and Penrose, R. (1996), ‘Conscious events as orchestrated
space-time selections’, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 3(1), pp. 36–53.
Josephson, B.D. (1988), ‘Limits to the Universality of Quantum
Mechanics’, Foundations of Physics 18, pp. 1195–1204.
http://www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk/~bdj10/files/QMlimits
Josephson, B.D and Pallikari-Viras, F. (1991), ‘Biological Utilisation
of Quantum Nonlocality’, Foundations of Physics 21, 197–207.
Josephson, B.D. (1995), A Trans-Human Source for Music? paper presented
at conference on New Directions in Cognitive Science, Saariselka
http://www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk/~bdj10/files/music3
Josephson, B.D. and Carpenter, T (1996). ‘What can music tell us about
the nature of the mind? A Platonic Model’, Toward a Science of
Consciousness,, ed. S.R. Hameroff, A.W. Kaszniak and A.C. Scott, MIT
Press, pp 691–4.
http://www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk/~bdj10/files/music2
Penrose, R. (1994), Shadows of the Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Penrose, R. and Hameroff, S. (1995), ‘What Gaps? Reply to Grush and
Churchland’, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2(2), pp. 98–11.
Scott, A. (1996), ‘On quantum theories of the mind’, Journal of
Consciousness Studies, 3(5–6), pp. 484–491.
Srivastava, Y. and Widom, A. (1987), ‘Quantum electrodynamic processes
in electrical engineering circuits’, Physics Reports 148(1), pp. 1–65.
Stapp, H. (1996), ‘The hard Problem: a quantum approach’, Journal of
Consciousness Studies, 3(3), pp. 194–210.
A few comments
1. "In the first chapter he uses a formula of Beckenstein and Hawking
concerning black holes..."
See Hawking's "The Universe in a Nutshell." The formula is
Entropy of a Black Hole/(Boltzmann's constant) = (Area of Event Horizon
of Infinite Red Shift)/4(Gravity Quantum of Area)
i.e.
S/kB = A/4Lp^2
Lp^2 = hG/c^3 ~ (10^-33 cm)^2 = 10^-66 cm^2
h = Planck's quantum of action
G = Newton's constant of gravity
c = speed of light in classical or non-exotic vacuum that weighs nothing
because it has vanishing net zero point quantum pressure.
Lenny Susskind & Co then say that given any volume V of 3D space with a
boundary of area A, that the total information that can be packed inside
it is not ~ V/Lp^3 but is also A/4Lp^2. However, it is not clear if
Lenny means "qubits" or "c-bits" - probably the latter is required by
thermodynamic entropy. The issue is whether the Universe (or Universes)
is (are) micro-quantum computer(s) or a classical computer, or something
else? Is the Universe a "conscious computer" having Hawking's "Mind of God"?
http://stardrive.org/cartoon/spectra.html
Current observations from WMAP NASA Space Probe, gravity lensing of
quasars, Galactic dark matter halo, type 1a supernovae standard candles
... show that ~ 96% of the "stuff" of the universe is not made of
ordinary matter (i.e. lepto-quarks and gauge force bosons like photons
in the "real" on-mass-shell state), but is made of "virtual"
off-mass-shell exotic forms of physical vacuum that has "weight". Indeed
73%, on the large scale at least, is exotic vacuum of negative
micro-quantum zero point pressure that forms a strong anti-gravity
field. This is The Right Stuff to make weightless warp drives and star
gate time machines with an infinite photon red shift rather than
Hawking's infinite photon blue shift at the moment the star gate allows
travel back through time! Not an explosion, but a whimper. Hawking's
chronology protection conjecture is proved wrong daily by tourists from
the future in their flying saucers. What is at stake here is how to
value the evidence. The Mainstream Pundits reject evidence like the
Cardinals refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. The Truth,
nevertheless is Out There and the Military Intelligence "Black Ops" is
fully aware of that essentially paranormal reality. Furthermore, on this
theory of "partial vacuum coherence" out of which Einstein's gravity
emerges, like the elasticity of a crystal emerges from atomic physics,
dark matter detectors have as much chance of clicking with the right
kind of exotic particles whizzing through space as did the
Michelson-Morley interferometer had of showing the motion of Earth
through the mechanical aether of Galileo's relativity prior to
Einstein's 1905 special theory of relativity. All this supersymmetry
stuff is wrong.
The Super Cosmos we live in is not only stranger than mainstream
scientists imagine, it is stranger than many of them can imagine. Indeed
many live in Fear and Loathing of facing The Question.
"The Question is: What is The Question?" John Archibald Wheeler. It's
time to come out of Plato's Cave.
Dingle Bay, Ireland
2. "to argue that the early universe ought to have been highly
disordered, a result inconsistent with the observed uniformity of the
cosmic background radiation. He rejects the standard explanation for
this uniformity based on the inflationary model of the Big Bang claiming
it to be invalid, and suggests that a more advanced and as yet
unformulated physical theory may resolve the problem."
This is the arrow of time problem of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
The problem is that modern inflationary cosmology is ad-hoc. There is no
dynamical reason for the complex scalar field the "inflaton" introduced
with the classical Einstein-Hilbert action of general relativity.
Penrose points out that one still needs to ad-hoc fine tune to set the
direction of the cosmic clock ticking correctly so that we age as the
Universe expands.
My theory here is different and may answer Roger's objection. The
inflaton and the Higgs field are the same field at different scales and
they both come from a false vacuum dynamical instability that results in
an entropy lowering collapse of the phase space volume of the false
vacuum to a smaller phase space volume of the true vacuum we live in.
Entropy is the logarithm of the phase space volume.
The pre-inflationary false vacuum is essentially the massless quantum
twistor space of Penrose, i.e. in more mundane form it is globally flat
quantum electrodynamics with the 15 parameter conformal space-time
symmetry group. There are no rest masses because there is no gravity as
yet. Gravity and inertia are equivalent but there is no sign of either
in this false unstable conformal vacuum where electrons have zero rest
mass. There are no real electrons or anything else - all is virtual.
There are no quasi-particle excitations in the pre-inflationary false
vacuum. Then the instability happens and the virtual electron-positron
pairs Bose-Einstein condense into a giant macro-quantum coherent vacuum
wave. This vacuum wave is local in the center of mass of the large
number of phase-locked virtual pairs. This neatly explains the low
initial entropy of the post-inflationary universe, why macro-physics is
local with no giant Schrodinger Cat states and how Einstein's gravity
emerges, like crystal elasticity (A. Sakharov and P.W. Anderson both
circa 1967) with both dark energy and dark matter as a bonus. This
macro-quantum coherent order parameter is the "inflaton" on the large
scale as well as the Higgs field for lepto-quark inertial rest masses on
the small scale in accord with Einstein's gravity and equivalence
principle. Wheeler's geometrodynamics with lepto-quarks as micro-geons
(quasi Kerr-Newman) "mass without mass", "charge without charge" as
quantized "vortex fluxes" actually works because there is a strong
short-range effective gravity ~ 10^40G at 1 fermi scale from zero point
quantum pressures both negative and positive as required. One needs the
Bohm pilot-wave theory with hidden variables (the spatially extended
micro-geons) to visualize this. One gets Regge trajectories and the
incredible shrinking lepto-quarks in deep inelastic scattering
("partons") from the elementary idea in Kip Thorne's "Black Holes and
Time Warps" where the micro-geon circumference is much smaller than its
"radius" ~ e^2/mc^2 ~ 1 fermi for the bare electron without its virtual
electron-plasma cloud extending out to 137 fermis ~ h/mc Compton
wavelength -- A pretty picture indeed! The stability of the electron is
neatly explained without needing "point particles" so there is no
infinite renormalizations needed and we do not need the unstable extra
space dimensions of M theory to rid physics of the plague of infinite
renormalizations! Feynman told me in 1968 that it was a scandal that no
one was able to do better. Herbert Frohlich told me in 1967 at UCSD that
the idea of the "point electron" was what was wrong with physics. J.P.
Vigier has shown how the spatially-extended electron allows a new kind
of atomic bomb in principle that is a kind of explosive "cold fusion".
This idea was worked on by Maric and Dragic in Beograd during our ISSO
period 1999-2000. I lost touch with whether they suceeded after Joe
Firmage went bust and ISSO folded along with NASA BPP and the SARA
Project in Huntington Beach, CA. I note an article in Popular Mechanics
about Eugene Mallove's unsolved recent murder and "Cold Fusion" as it
could be applied to terrorist-nukes by Jim Wilson, the Technical Editor
on this as well as two in PRAVDA in 2004. See also Sir Martin Rees "Our
Final Hour" on this sort of issue.
3. I have no comments at this time on Brian's deep critique of Roger's
position on consciousness and Strong AI.
Suffice it to say that I think consciousness is a macro-quantum coherent
phenomenon where phase rigidity resists environmental decoherence for
the same reason space-time is stiff i.e. G/c^4 making metric engineering
of the fabric of space-time for weightlesss warp drive impossible by a
brute force approach. Signal nonlocality absent in micro-quantum theory
is essential for ordinary inner consciousness as well as the kind of
remote viewing and psychokinesis e.g. Uri Geller's spoon bending
reported by Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ at SRI in the 1970's under CIA
and DOD contracts e.g. James Schnabel's "Remote Viewers: The Secret
History of America's Psychic Spies" as well as papers by both Puthoff
and Targ and my own three books on Amazon.com.
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