> Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, and Goodstein's theorem sometime later, made an indelible imprint on Penrose. He took from these theorems that there’s a unique property of the physical universe giving rise to conscious understanding. This is our human ability to understand truths that cannot be derived from the rules that gave us those truths. In other words, the rules allow us to ascertain truths beyond the rules. The ability to understand Gödel and Goodstein’s theorems means there’s something about our conscious understanding that is not confined to computational boundaries. Since all theories of physics are computational, Penrose believes something must be happening in the reduction of the quantum state that gives rise to non-computational understanding. “All I have are all the theories we know in physics. Computational, computational, computational. I mean, you've got to find room for this thing,” says Penrose. He confirms that this thing that physics has to make room for is understanding.

That's actually meaty stuff. Quite a good article and fascinating topic. Intuition gets scoffed at a lot in scientific discussions, but at the end of the day, most of the best science is in part a product of our powerful intuition. Sure, it can lead even the brilliant astray, and idiots straight off the rails. But it is still one of the most powerful yet mysterious tools at our disposal.

“In other words, the rules allow us to ascertain truths beyond the rules.”

Gödel demonstrates nothing of the kind: humans can be _mistaken_ about their “truths”, and if you permit mistaken assertions into your formal system, well, Gödel simply doesn't apply.

This seems to me to be attributing a lot of complex things to consciousness that needn’t be.

To my view, although all things exist in all states all at once at some level (time being just a 4th feature of space, and all possible permutations of all dimensions being fundamentally extant, a fully populated vector mapping, by analogy)

By extension, time as we perceive it is strictly illusory.

Perception is only possible in subdomains of the universe where the presence of the observer is permissible (right circumstances and compatible laws of physics)

Perception in humans requires an entropic process of electrochemical activity. Entropic processes imply a time vector. That is why we can only perceive reality in the context of a vector through space time, with time being relative but essentially linear. Any other vector type would preclude entropy and by extension, observation.

In this way we are able to perceive all universes in which our existence is permissible and self consistent with our existence on the reverse track (universe states which can entropically evolve from a previous state where we also existed as an observer or a prototype observer)

When we observe things closely we can understand that they a are mostly “right here” but also a little to the left and right, and a tiny bit everywhere. The locus of a thing is where it exists, on average, within the entire spectrum of universes which support our past and present existence on the entropic vector. We see this in Casimir force, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, and other well documented features of our reality.

In fact, the less probable that something will interact with our existence (distance in time or space) the less focused its position and motion becomes… because it is less limiting to the bandwidth of universes we can exist in while observing it.

There are a lot of fascinating implications of this conjecture, but so far they all seem to be consistent with observable phenomenon.

I've been increasingly focused on the parallels between QM and how we build virtual worlds.

We have a number of virtual worlds where you have continuous spatial seed functions determining where things should be, but in a number of those worlds there's a feature of transformable geometry.

So they convert the continuous functions building out things like mountains or valleys into discrete units for which state changes can be tracked when interacted with by free agents.

Properly optimized, if these changes are not distinct from the state generated by the seed functions, the state is discarded.

So rather than focusing so far to the edges of consciousness collapse, I've been thinking more about the notion of free agency collapse.

That the universe converting from continuous wave functions to discrete units upon interaction (and converting back if persistent information about such interactions is erased) is tied to the inherent agency of the interactions. Effectively, if the consequence of Bell's paradox were superdeterminism, why convert to discrete units at all? Instead this may be an artifact of the existence of free will in how the universe tracks and handles state.

So whereas consciousness collapse puts a lot of heavy lifting on the poorly defined concept of consciousness and the subjective experience of the world, zeroing in on an interpretation centered around state management of free agent interactions gets to a similar result with potentially less amorphous baggage.

I am reminded of the theories that bees and migratory birds may be able to navigate due to sensitivity to quantum fields. Does this suggest a connection (or evolutionary origin?) between QM and brain / mind / consciousness?

No idea, but that was a fascinating read.

My problem with this is that before we study the connection between wave-function collapse and consciousness, we should study consciousness.

We can detect wave-function collapse, but how can we detect consciousness?

People with more microtubules should be "more conscious" according to the theory. Do people with more microtubules behave differently than those with fewer? If so, do these differences align with our conception of consciousness?

Personally, Penrose has it all wrong. It's the actin filliments, not the microtubules that give rise to consciousness.

What does it mean to be more conscious? It seems fairly binary to me.

It's only possible that it is a binary if you get quite arbitrary and reductive about the concept of consciousness. Along the lines of how for decades we kept trying to define what separated humans from animals, and each line we drew would eventually melt away the more we actually zoomed in to animal behavior in all it's myriad expressions.

By the word "conscious" we usually mean how most people would think about it as their subjective experience of being conscious, as opposed to being unconscious.

Personally I would say "being conscious" means that you are conscious of being conscious. Not just 'reacting" in some way to external stimuli.

You (or your sub-consciousness) can be "aware of" external stimuli. But being conscious (in my view) should refer to the internal experience of being aware that you are aware of something.