Shadows of the mind
when it appeared in 1989, Roger Penrose's The Emperor's New Mind was universally hailed as a marvelous survey of modern physics as well as a brilliant reflection on the human mind, offering a new perspective on the scientific landscape and a visionary glimpse of the possible future of science. Now, in Shadows of the Mind, Penrose offers another exhilarating look at modern science as he mounts an even more powerful attack on artificial intelligence. But perhaps more important, in this volume he points the way to a new science, one that may eventually explain the physical basis of the human mind. Penrose contends that some aspects of the human mind lie beyond computation. This is not a religious argument (that the mind is something other than physical) nor is it based on the brain's vast complexity (the weather is immensely complex, says Penrose, but it is still a computable thing, at least in theory). Instead, he provides powerful arguments to support his conclusion that there is something in the conscious activity of the brain that transcends computation - and will find no explanation in terms of present-day science.
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- Scott Aaronson mentions Penrose's "The Emperor's New Mind", but I feel "Shadows of the Mind" is putting forward a much clearer view of Penrose's thesis. At the current stage of my life I'm quite comfortably in Camp C. "Intelligence" and "consciousness" are not algorithmic.[1]
A lot of materialists are in Camp A. For some even today, LLM's are AGI. Unfortunately, the terminology is quite clearly not adequate. There's many a people that have very different ideas and feelings on what's what.
The question on whether you can have "intelligence" without "consciousness" or "self-reference" are just on top of those. How can we define if a machine is "conscious" if we can't agree on what consciousness is? Panpsychists solve that problem by going the other way and saying that everything is conscious.
Overall these are very interesting topics that we can all ponder. The realities at the current time are, however, that LLM's are indeed useful. And the harnessing tooling that is being employed those days solve a lot of actual usage problems. Whether they solve other fundamental issues remains to be seem IMO.
[1]. I realize a lot of people probably haven't read the book, but you can ask your garden variety LLM to give you a quick rundown on the four camps that Sir Roger is using :)
- If you genuinely want the strongest statement of it, read The Emperor's New Mind followed by Shadows of the Mind, both by Roger Penrose.
These books often get shallowly dismissed in terms that imply he made some elementary error in his reasoning, but that's not the case. The dispute is more about the assumptions on which his argument rests, which go beyond mathematical axioms and include statements about the nature of human perception of mathematical truth. That makes it a philosophical debate more than a mathematical one.
Personally, I strongly agree with the non-mathematical assumptions he makes, and am therefore persuaded by his argument. It leads to a very different way of thinking about many aspects of maths, physics and computing than the one I acquired by default from my schooling. It's a perspective that I've become increasingly convinced by over the 30+ years since I first read his books, and one that I think acquires greater urgency as computing becomes an ever larger part of our lives.
- That's too brief to capture it, and I'm not going to try to summarise(*). The books are well worth a read regardless of whether you agree with Penrose. (The Emperor's New Mind is a lovely, wide-ranging book on many topics, but Shadows of the Mind is only worth it if you want to go into extreme detail on the AI argument and its counterarguments.)
* I will mention though that "some" should be "all" in 2, but that doesn't make it a correct statement of the argument.
- No, Penrose is not dumb. He gives a very good argument in his books on limitations of AI, which is almost always misrepresented including in most of this thread. It is worth reading "Shadows of the Mind".
- - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Pirsig)
- Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (Hofstadter)
- Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness (Penrose)
- Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind (Suzuki)
- Demian (Hesse)
- The Stranger (Camus)
- Slaughterhouse-Five (Vonnegut)
- Another Roadside Attraction (Robbins)
I have read many books that have had an impact on me for a time, but these are the books that have had an enduring impact going on now for decades.
And yes, one of these books, Another Roadside Attraction, is unlike the others. You can substitute any Tom Robbins book, or read them all!, but this is the book that started it all for me. Tom Robbins' books taught me to not take life so seriously.
Demian and The Stranger may be fiction, but let's just say their purpose is to get across a philosophical point.
Finally, with regards to Slaughterhouse-Five, you'll just have to read it.
Enjoy!
- There are tons of written books and journals on this topic.
My favorite:
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/shadows-of-the-mind-...
