Often the visual people literally don’t finish the papers. But for geometric or visual work, you have to translate it into words. ‘If you’re doing algebra, you just write down the answer. I would fill my notebooks with all sorts of distorted pictures and interlocking faces and goodness knows what,’ says Penrose. ‘I liked to do realistic pictures, but sometimes I would branch out and do more surrealistic things. Father and son used to go for long walks together in search of things to draw. Penrose’s father Lionel was an artist as well as a psychiatrist and mathematician, and a great influence on Roger. But, as he explained it to me, his mind is unusually visual. Just after we spoke, in early December, Penrose received the Nobel Prize in Physics, so perhaps it’s no surprise that he should think a little differently. When I would talk to someone about an idea, I found myself not understanding a word they were saying.’ ‘I thought, maybe when I go to university, I’ll find people who think like me,’ he tells me, at the beginning of what was to be a fascinating conversation, stretching long into the afternoon. However, this revolution also ties in with the revolution that’s required to get to grips with the nature of consciousness - in which both quantum mechanics and gravity, according to Penrose, must play a role at the level of the brain’s microtubules (see here).Sir Roger Penrose was at school when he realized that his mind worked in an unusual way. Primarily, that revolution is required to square relativity theory and quantum mechanics (see here). He’s correct primarily because Penrose has himself often talked about the need for such a revolution. In any case, Dennett is correct to argue that a “revolution in physics” is required in order to sustain Penrose’s scepticism about sAI. (Other evolutionary theorists have “no need for the hypothesis of consciousness”.) What about sAI squaring with biology or natural selection?ĭennett is on safer ground here in the simple sense that some evolutionary theorists do indeed talk about intelligence and life. That may be true though it is hard to decipher how any talk (by AI theorists) of intelligence, consciousness or life could contradict anything in physics. Of course it can now be said that nothing in sAI actually and clearly contradicts anything in physics. So in that sense, strong AI isn’t really in tune with physics at all. Thus when AI theorists talk about intelligence, consciousness and life, they’re essentially going beyond physics. Physics ( as physics) has nothing to say about intelligence, let alone about consciousness or even life. What Penrose argues, on the other hand, does clash with both. That is, it seems that nothing in sAI clashes with either physics or biology. “hat has seen… is that the only way you’re going to show that the idea of strong artificial intelligence is wrong is by overthrowing all of physics and most of biology!” In any case, the main position that Dennett upholds is that strong AI is actually entirely in tune with both physics and biology whereas Penrose’s position seems to be at odds with these disciplines.
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