Joe Rogan Experience #1216 — Sir Roger Penrose Transcript

Transcript

0:00 All right, here we go. Three. Boom. And we're live. How are you, sir? And your belief that consciousness is not simply calculation, but that there's something more to it. I'll spend some of the time going to other talks that might be interesting. particle and it could be in one spot or it could be in another spot then you have all sorts of and I had some vague memory of something about energy,

3:01 man called Steen who talked on mathematical logic and he logic And I didn't like that idea. there's the Goldbach conjecture which But the idea, often, is in mathematics, And you say, maybe I've got a proof. That just goes on forever. then if it says yes, that's something you believe. But you can also see by the way it's constructed that it cannot be proved by this procedure.

7:07 Is it something following rules? Is this an algorithm? Well, this more or less says it's playing music or falling in love or whatever these things might be, Well, what about Newton's mechanics? You can put that on a computer. Well, because of calculations. There's many more parameters you've got to worry about. But it's just as computable as these other things.

10:30 in which the cat would be dead and alive at the same time, Now, everybody knows that who does quantum mechanics, involved in our understandings of things. okay, you have two computers talking to each other over there And consciousness is the key thing. well, you know, everybody seems to be thinking one thing, but the little kid notices that the emperor doesn't have any clothes.

13:23 I'll learn a bit about neurophysiology and so on. And by the time I get to the end of the book, I'll know pretty well Okay, well, that was a little disappointing, You get what's called environmental decoherence would happen, You know, I get lots of letters from people expect the oh, they're in your liver too, not just your brain, There are the ones called

16:00 arrangement which is connected with and they don't have so much symmetry, they've got So the idea is that in the brain, as a particular kind of cell. but it seems to be that it's completely unconscious. and moves the fingers around and plays a note with a little finger, different, But the cerebellum seems to be different and organized differently. Right, but how would they know which part partials are active during particular activities?

19:24 Now, the control of that are responsible for different activities, differences in different parts. And I think he's right. That's the feeling I get. You want to make sure that you can wake them up again. and that there's these microtubules which are pulling them. They're different kinds of things, probably a simplification of what's going but that's that's a good uh first first step yes

23:32 get a broad perspective on what's going on. It's for whatever reason people are inclined to lean towards. No, that did worry me. Like what makes you conscious? it is because it's certainly different i mean to have some internal perception of the external I mean, okay, we use language to a degree. I remember seeing one about elephants, They'd be doing that.

26:40 And the dogs, you see there was a route where some antelopes would tend to go and they had to go across the river. and they would hide just where the river starts. Communication of some kind. They seem to have some understanding of what the task is and what their roles are in the task. a lot of indication that uh well certainly chimps and elephants and things and dolphins, we know about them,

28:36 I want to read it. Different octopi and the way they could adapt to their environment by changing their actual, not just the look, but the texture of their skin instantaneously. so he put a camera on it. Yes. about some experiments on testing the intelligence of octopuses. You know, there's something else going on than just… Well, you see, I mean, it's going too far to think,

31:19 things called clathrin's these are molecules which inhabit the synapses. And the thing about which tells you that when you have a highly symmetrical structure like that, and there's a lot to I don't know but it's something very So it seems like there's I think it is getting deep into the way the physical What about the soles of your feet? And the cerebellum is different.

34:18 and they look kind of preposterous, like a platypus, for instance. So they did their own thing there. Yeah, marsupials. I'm not saying, unless I blame it, it gives some people the impression, Yes, indeed. So for someone like myself, I'm trying to pay attention to this is pretty crazy, yes. apart and you can see these quantum But people get them muddled, in my view. collapse of the wave function. And standard quantum mechanics really doesn't make sense.

37:18 and the theory works we have to think what it means and so on. yeah to uh the common person like myself my brain glazes over and uh my eyebrows raise up and i go The measurement part is not. which involves the collapse of the wave function, wave function and poor old Schrodinger was very upset by this quite right yes Well, even Niels Bohr, Because there's no evidence for it as of yet.

40:47 Yeah, yeah. I think that's pretty far-fetched. or something. because i had this as i say the i explained more or less the history of my ideas there and i did there's this area called Twister when i start thinking about the size and scale of everything i get to a certain point and my brain and they were discussing how the size of... I don't think you're going to have much fun inside a black hole.

44:28 you could have a few parties before you. You see, the history went back to, as a white dwarf. He just wanted less. black hole. So this was the first clear picture of collapse to a black hole. Now go crazy. So at that point, when the dust reaches the middle point, okay, it's not so that you didn't get singularities in the general case, So this was an object which was radiating an awful amount of energy,

48:45 it must be fairly small. It used to be called the Schwarzschild singularity. And I remember John Wheeler, who was at Princeton then, people, when you want to solve the Einstein equations, either you make a lot of assumptions about what happened. There's a mathematical theorem but you could sort of And you try it on a sphere, there's got to be a point where the hair makes a kind of singular point.

51:45 And a lot of people picked up on it, a point there where the density becomes infinite. You can't continue the equations of Einstein gone to zero right but it could be quite complicated and irregular not like the original and the mass translates into the size of the diameter of the hole. So there are good theorems which tell you that a general black hole, which is very complicated,

55:18 swallowed by the black hole you see i think the picture is to think not just of one galaxy, but a cluster. You see, our galaxy has this four million solar mass black hole, which where they were speculating that this could possibly Is it more woo? Yeah, what is that stuff? In 1917, he introduced what's called the cosmological constant. expansion. So Einstein

58:10 And he did that which is an irony because it turns out that this term which is quite different. to a picture which i've been trying to plug for a while now maybe up to 15 years i can't remember. The idea, it's hard to explain, but let me try. It came about And so those black holes become the hottest things around. So they disappear. but give me a bit of leeway.

1:01:10 is it probably doesn't have conscious stop, if you like. So if it had experiences, the moment of its creation would be one moment, up onto the edge now what you've got to think about is that this is a kind of geometry called and we have what's called a conformal When I say do it, they don't have a way As long as the stretching and squashing is isotropic, so just as much one way as the other way,

1:03:57 but that was the point of view I had, and making it into a boundary. So you need a condition which tells you was a former student of mine Paul Todd who's colleague of mine and he used this which is what we live off in a way. like a boundary, but when they get so hot, you can forget about the mass. There will be another one after us. not quite the same and and you see it's still

1:07:39 has sort of bounces and that doesn't join onto which is that my one gets rid of that So I had one idea about that. I think today or tomorrow the whole cluster. And what happens to the energy in Well, there will be a big release of energy at that point and that's what we call in the last scattering surface more energetic in the middle and it tapers off as you go to the edge and we seem to see these

1:11:39 that's what they complain about. in the simulation. But if you work out the probability possibility of independent yeah well you, there are two reasons for Schrodinger's that argument. might have these we've drifted off into some world the dead cat and the live cat, different worlds with cats. and then you are led I think I have a different view, And so how do you explain this?

1:16:18 For someone like me, it's so interesting to know that there's still a considerable amount of speculation. But I've got these Polish and I've got an Armenian colleague who's done things on this too. there's something else going funny on, matter and dark energy or perhaps a better definition of what those things are? Dark matter, I didn't go into this, but in the scheme of mind, it has to be there.

1:18:14 which is scalar They're about what's called the Planck mass. It's measurable. I wouldn't like to put my money anywhere there, It's puzzling. It's quite possible. So if two collide, then you'd have a big pile of dust in the middle. How interested are you in the possibility of other intelligent life forms? in which we their So eons, how many billions of years are you talking about?

1:23:05 we have counted as years you see the trouble is it's a cheat the year count So are you essentially saying that it's entirely Well, there would have been. Yes, but it would have to be in the form of photons or something. Sure. planet and they could have got there quite ahead of us it's it's conceivable i'm not going to rule of real evidence I haven't really

1:25:46 different intelligence which came quite close in in our solar system oh that was that strange in some way. Oh, sure. although the consciousness one is using my name, So to have a place which supports that kind of thing is great, who I knew about and who had these ideas of how to use Bose-Einstein condensates of wave function is a phenomenon which is of the kind which I hope might be like gravitational

1:29:39 that are being pursued they have to be ideas which are capable of tests and have a reasonable chance of of but turns out to be in fact accurate and provable. And you need to be able to break free of those from time to time, but not in a way which is too crazy to be examined, I agree. on this, and So I said, what about you? And this disagrees with this observation and so on.

1:32:04 Or yes, no, you're right. I don't really know. And they maybe say, who work on these things too. and to other people don't look as crazy as my ideas, you see, And it seems like the more I talk to people like yourself but the point about them is adhere to the facts, No, I agree. But you see, you've got to... And there'd be other ones Yeah. That's correct.