Surely you must appreciate the irony when your primary argument is an appeal to authority, while on the other hand you dismiss everyone who is unconvinced as "dogmatic".
As for Penrose's specific ideas, i'm not familiar enough with them or the field to make an informed judgement. Hence i would defer to other experts in that field, who as far as i understand are unconvinced. However, the fact he previously won a nobel does not lead me to give him any more credence than i would anyone else. If anything its a negative signal.
That said, if i was going to bite:
> Penrose’s main argument is that consciousness can not be computational. If you can’t argue against an idea with reason
The onus is on Penrose to show consciousness is non-computational. Preferably with some sort of experiment (or are we in the realm of pure philosophy here? Arguing how many angels are dancing on the pin). Science is about creating hypotheses and testing them. Admiteddly im not super well-read on this topic, but i don't think this theory has yielded testable predictions not explainable by other theories that have been verified.
This is also an appeal to authority.
Plus I’m not arguing that Penrose is correct, I’m arguing that it’s unscientific to call a theory bullshit because it sounds “woo” or “new age.” It should be debated on its merits, and yes I did make an appeal to authority for the same reasons you did: it’s a useful heuristic if we don’t have the capacity to evaluate every idea on its merits.
> However, the fact he previously won a nobel does not lead me to give him any more credence than i would anyone else. If anything it’s a negative signal.
So you’re saying that being a Nobel laureate is a counter signal for scientific credibility?
> The onus is on Penrose to show consciousness is non-computational. Preferably with some sort of experiment (or are we in the realm of pure philosophy here? Arguing how many angels are dancing on the pin).
I mean there’s the whole field of mathematics and most of modern physics that use mathematical proofs instead of experiments, including the main article this thread is on. I don’t disagree that an experiment would be ideal, but again, my point was not to argue that Penrose is correct but that it’s unscientific and akin to religious dogma to call his theory bullshit because it sounds like a “new age” idea.
We can now simulate every aspect of consciousness except for long-term memory consolidation, to the extent that you can't tell if you're talking to a conscious person or a computer. The existence of LLMs means that no quantum woo is necessary to explain consciousness. Our brains just do the same thing by different means.
In short, Penrose's argument is a religious one, not a scientific one.
Indeed. Thinking is not the same as experiencing thinking.
> there’s no way to know if any other people, much less machines, are conscious.
Or even ourselves :D
"Consciousness is just an illusion" "If so, who's experiencing the illusion?" "Yes"