RIP. Thanks for all the knowledge. As an aside, I thought I was looking at a picture of Chevy Chase at first.
Give it a few months
As per his request, his funeral will be held at the Hadron collider.
Where his body will be accellerated to near light speed before it is collided with the anti-Higgs.
Too soon.
Rest in peace, Boss(on) man. Some hefty contributions to our understanding of quantum physics, and all around a good civilized man.
Well now that he’s dead we’re gonna find it.
The Higgs Boson was actually discovered by a team using the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in 2012.
Wait. Really? I always hear about how it’s impossible and whatnot.
It was, and then we went and built an impossible machine to find it.
I’m still cheesed it’s not unanimous that Roger Penrose is the greatest living physicist.
Like., I’m pretty sure even Hawking says it’s Penrose, he just never got his name on something household famous.
Penrose like Linus Pauling went down the crackpot road which damaged his reputation.
Pauling went around news programs claiming mega doses of vitamin C would cure cancer.
Penrose got into “quantum mind” crackpottery.
Penrose got into “quantum mind” crackpottery.
Weird way to say:
Has spent 20 years working on a theory of what causes consciousness and has pretty much the only idea besides “who the duck knows”
Nonsense is still nonsense. Penrose like many physicists, is speculating outside of his core expertise to his own detriment.
speculating outside of his core expertise
…
He’s been focusing on it for like 20 years… And not on his own, he’s been working with psychologists and anesthesiologists. Dude is pretty much the only physicist working at understanding consciousness, he’s literally the expert
And that’s not even getting into how physics is technically outside his expertise. Dudes a mathematician, he just applied that to physics, then applied physics to brains.
He doesn’t claim to understand all of it, just like Einstein died before his shit was proven. Then Penrose showed up and worked with Hawking to prove a lot of Einstein’s theories.
Penrose 100% accepts he won’t live long enough to see his stuff finished. But he’s confident it’s in the right direction and if future generations keep working, some day we’ll actually understand what consciousness is.
But it’s not exactly easy man.
Penrose is a physicist. Thats where his expertise lies. He is not a neuroscientist, psychologist or any other profession that is relevant. He is NOT an expert in the area he has barged into. Being competent in one field DOES NOT translate into competence in others.
You may as well ask a very good plumber about how they think the brain works.
Okay but you can probably ask someone that is not a biologist to learn about certain aspects of the brain and how it works. While you can’t ask a plumber how the brain works for example, you can probably get his perspective on things related to blood flow (to some extent). Maybe you ask a chemist about certain chemicals in the brain and so on.
It might not be the best idea however to claim as a plumber that consciousmess is a series of pipes, but it’s fine to give a view of something through a different lens.
Hell, neither me or you are experts in any of this, or experts in something to do with debating scientists or socials in gneeral, but here we are giving perspectives anyway.
My perspective is that someones’ opinion isnt worth anything unless they actually have relevant expertise in what they are talking about. I do not need a degree in neuroscience to point that out.
Some opinions are worth more than others. Opinions based on facts and relevant expertise matter more than ones that arent. Penrose DOES NOT have the expertise needed to be taken seriously when it comes to consciousness.
There are dozens of ideas. It’s ok if a researcher says, “I don’t know.”
Besides, Penrose has no idea either. He only adds an extra “quantum did it” layer between “this is what we know” and “this is how consciousness works.”
Claiming a brain is a quantum computer doesn’t answer any questions about consciousness.
