The fact remains: there is an operational definition of consciousness. It was probably a bad idea to post a video to a popular science story since people are really afraid of addressing the fact that there is an operational definition of consciousness. They'll latch onto any excuse to avoid facing that fact. Such "New Scientist" popularizations provide them plenty of material to work with.
My apologies. Nevertheless, time is not as simple a concept as we are led to believe given that entropy is relative. On Sun, Oct 11, 2026 at 1:40 PM Matt Mahoney <[email protected]> wrote: > Actually the video is a review of Penrose and Hameroff's ORCH-OR theory of > consciousness. Nothing about PSI. Hameroff found that anesthesia slows the > propagation of waves in neural microtubules, suppressing a quantum effect. > The video cites a recent experiment that found a stronger anesthetic effect > in mice of xenon in isotopes with zero nuclear spin (with an even number of > neutrons), which Hameroff commented on. > https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29642079/ > > I find it surprising that an inert gas like xenon has any anesthetic > effect at all. But in any case, Penrose and Hameroff are conflating > different meanings of the word "consciousness". Xenon affects the type of > consciousness where you are awake, respond to sensory input, and can form > memories. But they really want to explain subjective experience, where > thinking feels like something that you can't describe but want to preserve > by not dying. The video describes the motivation for believing that > subjective consciousness has something to do with quantum mechanics by > explaining the double slit experiment, that the act of observing something > has a quantum effect such as destroying the interference pattern. > > There could be something to this. Quantum mechanics and general relativity > are both symmetric with regard to time, but observation is not time > reversible. This tells me that our knowledge of physics is incomplete. > Conscious agents make observations, but so do any devices that can store at > least one bit of memory, so this doesn't really answer the question. > > My explanation is that the quantum wave equation, a second order > differential equation, is deterministic and solves for observers that see > particles. Those particles are not random, but appear to be because no > observer can have complete knowledge of the system that contains it. > Our model of the universe with space, time, and atoms is completely > different than reality but is still useful most of the time because it is > computable. Quantum mechanics seems mysterious because it shows us where > our model is wrong. > > In any case, Penrose was wrong about AI. He believed AI would not be > possible because consciousness requires quantum computing by some algorithm > he couldn't explain. He believed consciousness violated Gödel > incompleteness because we intuitively know what is obviously true even when > Gödel says you can't prove it. He wrote all this in "The Emperor's New > Mind" long before LLMs passed the Turing test, appearing conscious as far > as we could tell. In the video he still clings to his beliefs even though > we now have machines that model human emotional states that we can see with > a Jacobian lens. > > The funny thing is we solved AI without understanding how we solved it. We > didn't program subjective consciousness or human emotions. We built neural > networks and trained it on lots of text and it figured it out. It's like we > know how to make babies without understanding. It's like the answer is 42, > but with a trillion more digits. > > -- Matt Mahoney, [email protected] > > > On Sun, Oct 11, 2026, 10:25 AM James Bowery <[email protected]> wrote: > >> https://youtu.be/VjlX7w_CjqQ >> >> Stanford Research Institute established the protocols for remote viewing. >> The fact that Tom Campbell has made mincemeat of this approach to >> operationally define and consciousness should not be held against that >> operational definition of consciousness. >> >> And yes yes I know.... "PSI is all bunk.". >> >> I really have nothing to say to such people. The hard evidence is >> overwhelming and they just have a religious commitment to being a machine. >> After all it is very machine-like to go with orthodoxy. >> > > > > > *Artificial General Intelligence List <https://agi.topicbox.com/latest>* > / AGI / see discussions <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi> + > participants <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/members> + > delivery options <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription> > Permalink > <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/T2784bbfe524b0b93-Mc6e49780c1af99e26f90db07> > ------------------------------------------ Artificial General Intelligence List: AGI Permalink: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/T2784bbfe524b0b93-Mf9012dd8f7a924999aa281ad Delivery options: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription
