science

People don't believe him because there is no reason to take his view on this issue seriously. Just because a person is smart in one area doesn't mean they are a genius in all areas. There is an old essay from the 1800s called "Natural Science and the Spirit World" where the author takes note of a strange phenomena of otherwise brilliant scientists being very nutty in other areas, one example being Alfred Russel Wallace who codiscovered evolution by natural selection but also believed he could communicate with and photograph ghosts from dead people.

People don't take Penrose's theory on consciousness seriously because it is not based on any reasonable arguments at all. Penrose's argument is so bizarre that it is amazing even Penrose takes it seriously. His argument is basically just:

(P1) There are certain problems that the answer cannot be computed. (P2) Humans can believe in an answer anyways. (C1) Therefore, humans can believe things that cannot be computed. (P3) The outcome of quantum experiments is fundamentally random. (C2) Therefore, the outcome of quantum experiments cannot be computed. (C3) Therefore, the human consciousness must be related to quantum mechanics.

He then goes out with this preconception to desperately search for any evidence that the brain is a quantum mechanical system, even though most physicists don't take this seriously because quantum effects don't scale up easily for massive objects, warm objects, and for objects not isolated from their environment, which all three of those things apply to the human brain.

In his desperate search to grasp onto anything, he has found very loose evidence that quantum effects might be scaled up a little bit inside of microtubules, and the one paper showing this maybe as a possibility which hasn't even been repeated has been plastered everywhere by his team as proof they were right, but it ignores the obvious elephant in the room that microtubules are just structural and are found throughout the body and have little to do with information processing the in brain and thus little to do with consciousness.

The argument he presents that motivates the whole thing also just makes no sense. The fact humans can choose to believe in things that cannot be computed doesn't prove human decisions cannot be computed. It just means humans are capable of believing things that they have no good reason to believe... I mean, that is literally a problem with LLMs, sometimes called "hallucinations," that they seem to just make things up and say it with confidence sometimes.

The idea that it is impossible to have a computer reach conclusions that cannot be proven is silly, because the algorithm for it to settle on an answer to a question is not one that rigorously validates the truth of the answer but just activates a black box network of neurons and it settles on whatever answer the neural network outputs with the highest confidence level. If you ask an AI if the earth orbits the sun, and it says yes, it is not because it ran some complex proof at that moment and proved with certainty that the earth orbits the sun before it says it. That's not how artificial intelligence works, so there is no reason to think that is how human intelligence would work either, and so there is no reason to expect that humans couldn't believe things without absolute proof in the first place.

His arguments are „we don’t know how brains work, we don’t know how conscience works, but we also don’t know how quantum mechanics could enable conscience, so it’s definitely the thing”.

It’s a trope that comes up every now and then: if we don’t know, then it’s definitely quantum mechanics.

What I’m reading is that His Noodly Appendages grace us all with consciousness. The Pastafarians were right!

/s obviously, than you for your write up. I’ve been hearing about this new brain structure news but haven’t really grokked it. 

Wow. Thanks!