The Physics of Consciousness: There IS Such a Thing?
There are no really good theories of consciousness but some physicists, including Roger Penrose, make a good stab at it. Jordan Peterson listensYes. Jordan Peterson talks to Roger Penrose about that:
Dr. Peterson recently traveled to the UK for a series of lectures at the highly esteemed Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. This conversation was recorded during that period with Sir Roger Penrose, a British mathematical physicist who was awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics for “discovering that black hole formation is a robust predictor of Einstein’s general relativity.” Moderated by Dr. Stephen Blackwood.
___________ Chapters ___________ [0:00]
Intro [1:00] Is Consciousness Computational?
[3:20] Turing Machines
[6:30] Determinism & the Arrow of Time
[12:15] Consciousness & Reductionism
[17:30] Emergent Randomness & Evolution
[23:00] The Tiling Problem, Computation, & AI
[29:30] Escher, Brains, Bach
[39:00] Pattern Recognition & Intuition
[45:30] Mathematical Representations & the Physical World
[54:00] Collapsing Schrodinger’s Equation
[1:00:00] Consciousness-Independent Reality
[1:07:00] Black Holes & Time Horizons
[1:15:00] Einstein’s Biggest Mistake
[1:27:00] Meaning & Consciousness
[1:39:00] Hawking Spots: Potential
You may also wish to read: What would head or partial brain transplants do to consciousness? Researchers had some success swapping rodent heads (though there’s a catch) but no luck with monkeys. And then animal lovers weighed in… About partial brain transplants, Michael Egnor asks, if he received bits of brain from many sources, “would there be a neighborhood in my skull?” A townhall?