Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1216 - Sir Roger Penrose
Uploaded: 2018-12-18T23:48:49.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1216 - Sir Roger Penrose' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2018-12-18. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1216 - Sir Roger Penrose' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2018-12-18. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1216 - Sir Roger Penrose

all right here we go three
boom and we're live how are you sir i'm fine pretty good thank you for doing
this i appreciate
it that's fine my pleasure who roped you into this well i think i suppose james
tag probably
i i'm a big fan of your work i've read much of your work i've seen many of your
interviews and
videos online and uh one of the things that i really wanted to talk to you
about that i find
quite interesting is consciousness and your belief that consciousness is not
simply calculation but
that there's something more to it and what what you think this more could
possibly be from a
scientific perspective which is unusual because a lot of people have some
theories about consciousness
but they're usually crazy people like myself well i mean we're all conscious
and so we may have
theories about it yeah but um no the ideas came by somewhat roundabout route uh
i i went to
cambridge to graduate work it was mathematics i was working on pure
mathematical subjects algebraic
geometry but i thought you know we got three years i'll spend some of the time
going to other talks
that might be interesting so i went to three talks particularly which had a big
influence on me
one was a talk by herman bondy was a on general relativity cosmology wonderful
talk with very sort
of animated presentation he had and then there was a talk by paul dirac one of
the founders of quantum
mechanics and his talk well his complete wonderful talk to wonderful lectures
as well but in a completely
different style he was very quiet and precise and what he said and everything
anyway the very first
lecture he was talking about the superposition principle in quantum mechanics
so if you have a
particle and it could be in one spot or it could be in another spot then you
have all sorts of states
where it could be in both places at once and that's sort of strange but you've
got to get used to that
idea and he illustrated with his piece a piece of chalk and i think he broke it
in two to illustrate it
could be in one spot or in the other and my mind sort of wandered at that point
i don't know what i was
thinking about but i wasn't concentrating and about a few minutes later he'd
finished his description his
explanation and i had some vague memory of something about energy but i didn't
understand what he said
and i've been totally mystified by this ever since so i i suppose if i'd heard
what he said he would
have said something to calm me down and and sort of accept it in one way or
another but as it was
it seemed to me this was a major issue how on earth do you have things that don't
behave according to
what quantum mechanics says like cricket balls and baseballs and things like
that anyway that's two of
the talks the other course was a course by a man called steen who talked on
mathematical logic
and he explained things like girdle's theorem and turing machines turing
machines being the
mathematical notion upon which modern computers are based or computers
basically and
the thing about girdle's theorem you see i heard i used to have a colleague
when i was
at undergraduate ian percival who also became a scientist later on and we
talked about
uh logic and you know how you could make this kind of mathematical systems
which worked out logic and
i'd heard about this girdle's theorem which seemed to say that there were
things in mathematics that you
just couldn't prove and i didn't like that idea but i when i heard the when i
went to this course by
steen and he explained what it really says and what it says suppose you've got
a method of proving things
in mathematics and when i say things i mean things with numbers the one famous
example is fermar's last
theorem uh there's the goldbach conjecture which isn't yet proved that every
even number bigger than
two is the sum of two prime numbers that's the sort of example of the thing it's
just sort of mathematical
things about numbers which you can see what they mean uh but it may be very
difficult to see whether
it's true or untrue but the idea is often is in mathematics you've got a system
of methods of proof
and the key thing about these methods of proof is that you can have a computer
check whether you've done it
right so you these rules you know they could be adding a and b it's the same as
b and a and things like that
and you um if you give your you say to the computer say here is a theorem like
goldbach conjecture
and you see whether it can be proved and you say maybe i've got a proof and
this follows these steps
and you give it to the computer and it says yep you've done it right it's true
or maybe it would say
you've done it right and it's not true or it may not say anything that just go
on forever but these
are the sort of outcomes and the point about it is that if you believe that
these procedures do give
you a proof in other words that if the algorithm says yeah it's true then you
believe that it is
true because you've understood all the rules you looked at the first one say
yeah yeah that's okay
you look at the second one said mom oh yeah i see okay that's great and you go
all the way down and as long
as you're convinced all those rules work then if it says yes that's something
you believe
okay now what girdle shows as he constructs a very specific sentence a
statement which is a number
thing like like the fair mass loss theorem or something think about numbers
which
what he shows is if you trust this algorithm for proving mathematical things
then you can see by the way it's constructed that it's true but you can also
see by the way it's
constructed that it cannot be proved by this procedure now this was amazing to
me because it tells me
that okay you cannot formalize your understanding in in a scheme which you
could put on a computer
that you see this statement which girl comes up with is something you can see
on the basis of the same
understanding that allows you to trust the rules that it's true but that it's
not actually derivable by
the rules it you see it's true by virtue of your belief in the rules and this
to me was amazing and i thought golly you know
what's understanding what's understanding what does it mean is it something
following rules is it an algorithm
well this more or less says it's not an algorithm because whatever it was there
would be something
that you could still see is true even though you don't get it through the
algorithm that you had in the first place
so this was a lot of subtleties about this too which people argue about
endlessly but it was pretty convincing to me
that this shows that we don't think when we understand something that what's
going on in our heads
is not an algorithm it's not following rules it's something else it's something
that requires our conscious
appreciation of what we're thinking about i'm thinking is a conscious thing and
understanding is a conscious activity so i formed the view that conscious
activities whatever they
are not just that kind of thing but you know i'm playing music or we're falling
in love or whatever
these things might be are not computations there's something else going on and
then i thought because
i you know i like to think myself as a scientist and i think that what's going
in on our heads
is according to the laws of physics and these laws of physics um pretty good
they seem to
work well in the outside world and so i believe that the laws that work in our
heads are the same as
those laws so i began to think about it well what about newton's mechanics well
you could put that on a
computer what about einstein's special relativity you could do that what about
maxwell's wonderful equations
which tell you how electricity and magnetism operate and light and radio waves
and all these things that's
all follows this beautiful set of equations that maxwell produced you can put
that on a computer
okay you may have to worry about approximations and these depend on continuous
numbers rather
discrete things but i didn't think that's the answer then i thought what about
general relativity
einstein's theory of gravity with curved space and all that well you we're
familiar now with ligo this
detector which has detected black holes spiraling into each other from distant
galaxy and how do we know
that those signals are black holes but well because of calculations people have
put this thing on an
algorithm and you know what those signals look like so einstein's general
relativity sure you can put that
on a computer on a computer what about quantum mechanics well there's the
famous equation of schrodinger
which tells you how a quantum state evolves you could put that on a computer
too it's difficult in many
ways there's many more parameters you've got to worry about but it's just as
computable as these other things
well you see i then remember dirac's lecture you see and how it is that these
things that work in the
quantum world don't seem to work at the level of classical big things and it
all depends on this
process of what's called measurement and quantum mechanics and the measurement
process is something
you learn how to do but it's not the schrodinger equation it's something else
and schrodinger himself was
very intrigued by this fact that his own equation gives you nonsense and you
the famous schrodinger's
cat where he produces a situation in which the cat would be dead and alive at
the same time
he produced that in example simply to demonstrate that roughly speaking his
equation gives you nonsense
under these circumstances so there's something else and the something else goes
beyond our current quantum
mechanics and it tells you what happens when the quantum state makes a decision
between but it doesn't
follow the schrodinger equation does one thing or the other now everybody knows
that who does quantum
mechanics but they think oh it's what's called making a measurement and you're
allowed to do something
different but that didn't make sense to me and so i had the view that okay
there is a big gap in our
understanding and if there's something in the world which isn't something you
could put on a computer
that's where it is so the view i've held that for a long time and uh that there's
something
non-computable something beyond computation involved in our understandings of
things
so that's a view i held for ages i didn't do much with it i just held the view
until i think there was a radio talk between marvin minsky and edward fred kinn
and they were
explaining about what computers can do and they were talking about okay you
have a computer two computers
talking to each other over there and you walk up to the room and the time you've
walked up the room to
the computers they have computer communicated with each other more thoughts
than the human race ever
has done you see and i thought well i see where you're coming from but i don't
think that's what's
happening in in human communication human understanding is something different
from what computers do and
consciousness is the key thing consciousness is something different from
computation so i've
held that view but then when i heard this talk by minsky and um and fredkin i
thought well i had
ideas of writing a book sometime in a long time in the future when i'm retired
this was some while back i
say and i thought well this gives it a focus and so i wrote this book called
the emperor's new mind
which is supposed to be saying well you know we everybody seems to be thinking
one thing but
yeah the little kid notices that that the emperor doesn't have any clothes so
it was the that theme
of that story which was the basis of the book so i say okay maybe lots of
people think that all we're
doing is computing but if you stand back and you say well no there's something
else going on
so that was the basis of my thoughts about consciousness but i wrote this book
thinking
that by the time i got to the end of the book you see it was it was a lot
mostly about physics and
mathematics and things like that but i was really aiming for this thing about
what's going on in