Penrose believed that the human mind does things that are not computable, stuff like consciousness, feelings, intuition, creativity, insight, free will, qualia. To prove it, he looked for quantum effects in the brain that could not be simulated on a non quantum computer. He and Hameroff found quantum superposition in the protein structure of microtubules in neurons and argued that no computer could simulate this.
Of course he was wrong. We now have LLMs that pass the Turing test, which means they have all the properties that he argued were not computable. It turns out you don't have to model microtubules to build a neural network, just like you don't have to model quantum tunneling of gate electrons in SSD memories to model the digital logic of a computer. -- Matt Mahoney, [email protected] On Mon, Aug 10, 2026, 9:53 PM John Rose via AGI <[email protected]> wrote: > On Tuesday, July 14, 2026, at 10:38 PM, Quan Tesla wrote: > > Thanks John. I like this a lot. > > The Orch-OR premise would be, when you observe locally, you collapse the > [local] wave function. > > > If I’m correct consciousness is going to be protocol agnostic, able to be > instantiated across substrates. Lowest level pancomputational/panphsychist > substrates might be quantum fields, a qubit framework, quantum state > topologies, Planck level automata, even ether. Was reading Ken Wheeler on > magnetism and ether, very interesting not sure the state of that lately. > Not sure of the most correct contemporary reality substrate there seems to > be many... And I like when intelligence is described as a physically > defined entity for example a field with dynamical laws in spacetime. Then > higher order intelligences and consciousnesses like human an AI can be > described as structures built on a base. Text is mostly UI and data storage > in my opinion. > > *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/T906c878e4ba411be-M64529c44a579c3e7dc68c481> > ------------------------------------------ Artificial General Intelligence List: AGI Permalink: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/T906c878e4ba411be-M61255954fb715249b2a3be5f Delivery options: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription
