Recovering academic now in public safety. You’ll find me kibitzing on brains (my academic expertise) to critical infrastructure and resilience (current worklife). Also hockey, games, music just because.

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • I think he does here, which is interesting. It is a little unclear because he keeps coming back to AI (and the interviewer is a douche) but he does seem to articulate that intelligence means consciousness which means something non-algorithmic.

    I’m not even sure I have my copy of New Mind anymore but I want to go back and check my understanding of what he was arguing back in 2004 or whenever it was.

    Eta: I feel like a doofus on a number of fronts. It was 1989, and right there in the wikipedia summary…

    Penrose argues that human consciousness is non-algorithmic, and thus is not capable of being modeled by a conventional Turing machine, which includes a digital computer. Penrose hypothesizes that quantum mechanics plays an essential role in the understanding of human consciousness. The collapse of the quantum wavefunction is seen as playing an important role in brain function

    So here is where I admit that Penrose is with it and I am going senile.













  • Anathem by Stephenson fits this bill. Cold open to a universe with no exposition and no viewpoint character that gets things explained to them. It’s pretty fucked up until you begin to piece together the clues and build the world logic for yourself.

    The Chronoliths by Robert Charles Wilson (not to be confused with that other Robert Wilson) deserves an honorable mention. The story is driven by the appearance of massive monument commemorating a military victory 20 years in the future. As the story progresses more of these future monuments appear as the story drives towards the conditions that will initiate the war.