Roger Penrose

According to Penrose, the fundamental conflict between the superposition principle of quantum mechanics and the principle of general covariance of general relativity entails the existence of wavefunction collapse, e.g. a quantum superposition of two different space-time geometries will collapse to one of them due to the ill-definedness of the time-translation operator for the superposition. In this paper, we argue that Penrose's conjecture on gravity's role in wavefunction collapse is debatable. First of all, it is still a controversial issue what the exact nature of the conflict is and how to resolve it. Secondly, Penrose's argument by analogy is too weak to establish a necessary connection between wavefunction collapse and the conflict as understood by him. Thirdly, the conflict does not necessarily lead to wavefunction collapse. For the conflict or the problem of ill-definedness for a superposition of different space-time geometries also needs to be solved before the collapse of the superposition finishes, and once the conflict has been resolved, the wavefunction collapse will lose its physical basis relating to the conflict. In addition, we argue that Penrose's suggestions for the collapse time formula and the preferred basis are also problematic.

It is suggested that Charles Sanders Peirce’s triadic semiotics provides
a framework for a diagrammatic representation of a sign’s proper structure. The
action of signs is described at the logical and psychological levels. The role of (unconscious)
abductive inference is analyzed, and a diagram of reasoning is offered. A
series of interpretants transform brute facts into interpretable signs thereby providing
human experience with value or meaning. The triadic structure helps in demystifying
the relations between Penrose’s three worlds when the latter are considered
as constituting a semiotic triangle.
KEY WORDS: abduction, Peirce, Penrose’s three worlds, process ontology,
semiotic reality, the diagrammatic reasoning, the complex plane

"Michel Weber & Anderson Weekes (eds.), Process Approaches to Consciousness in Psychology, Neuroscience, and Philosophy of Mind, Albany, New York, State University of New York Press, 2009. (484 p. ; ISBN 978-1-4384-2941-0 ; 65,32 €) (Jan 2011, paperback, ISBN 978-1-4384-2940-3)
A good part of what fuels the current boom in consciousness studies is the robust progress of cognitive psychology and neuroscience toward reaching consensus explanations of just about anything except consciousness. Despite hopes that empirical research and computational modeling would constrain theory, it seems that scholarly debate has not so much reached an impasse as remained at one reached in the 17th century. Given the massive effort currently invested in research and debate, the lack of progress towards a general (and generally accepted) theory of consciousness begins indeed to make consciousness look like a kind of 21st century Philosopher’s Stone, whose hidden nature seems to hold the key to the greatest mysteries, but continues to elude us. Accordingly, the present volume taps leading researchers and theorists in the study of consciousness and Whitehead scholars to explore an interface between process thinking and the burgeoning field of consciousness studies. In sum, the rationale for such a project has two main facets: first, the state of an educated debate that seems, first, unproductive and peculiarly burdened by its deep modernist origins; and, secondly, marked more by disciplinary rivalry than interdisciplinary synthesis.
Table of Contents
List of Contributors
Preface, Michel Weber & Anderson Weekes
1. Main Themes of the Book
2. Précis of the Contributions
I. Introductory Essays, Michel Weber & Anderson Weekes
1. Process Thought as a Heuristic for Investigating Consciousness
2. Whitehead as a Neglected Figure of 20th Century Philosophy
3. Consciousness as a Topic of Investigation in Western Thought
4. Whitehead’s Unique Approach to the Topic of Consciousness
II. Psychology and Philosophy of Mind
5. Consciousness as a Subjective Form, David Ray Griffin (Claremont)
6. The Interpretation and Integration of the Literature on Consciousness from a Process Perspective, Michael W. Katzko (Nijmegen)
7. Windows on Nonhuman Minds, Donald R. Griffin (Harvard)
III. From Metaphysics to (Neuro-)Science and Back Again
8. Panexperientialism, Quantum Theory, and Neuroplasticity, George W. Shields (Kentucky State)
9. The Evolution of Consciousness, Max Velmans (Goldsmiths)
10. The Carrier Theory Of Causation, Gregg H. Rosenberg (New York)
IV. Applications to Psychiatry: Consciousness as Process
11. The Microgenetic Revolution in Contemporary Neuropsychology and Neurolinguistics, Maria Pachalska (Lublin and Gdansk) and Bruce Duncan MacQueen (Bydgoszcz)
12. From Coma to Consciousness, Avraham Schweiger (Tel Aviv), Michael Frost (Tel Aviv) , Ofer Keren (Raanana and Tel-Aviv)
13. Consciousness and Rationality from a Process Perspective, Michel Weber (Chromatiques)
V. History (and Future?) of Philosophy
14. Consciousness, Memory, and Recollection according to Whitehead, Xavier Verley (Toulouse le Mirail)
15. Consciousness and Causation in Light of Whitehead’s Phenomenology of Becoming, Anderson Weekes (New York)"

In this paper, the author introduces the reader to Roger Penrose´s program against the dualism mind-world and discusses the most important philosophical consequences of Penrose´s program. The subject of the analysis is the constitution of a theory of consciousness within
the contemporary scientific and philosophical view of the world in the precise sense according to which the physical world is the shadow of the mind. Penrose names this new theory Objective Reduction (OR) and its aim is to show that the brain is sometimes governed by classical processes and some other times by quantum processes. After the characterization of consciousness by its ability to intuit truth from falsity, this paper puts the subject of discussion in the frame of a theory of fundamental processes or also in the line of complexity.

"Layman's Abstract:

This dissertation looks at how there is a texture to our temporal experience, how sometimes time seems to go faster, or slower, and how, on rare occasions, it seems to stop altogether. I suggest that this is a result of how time emerges from, and is mutually enfolded with timelessness. I suggest that this experience can be described with a fractal model that links our subjective experience to physical reality.

Traveling at the speed of light, photons exist outside of time. Time interacts with timelessness whenever matter interacts with light. Time emerges from timelessness at very small scales as the potential of a quantum wave function collapses into a physical manifestation. Our consciousness participates in this emergence/manifestation through quantum processes that occur at the smallest scales in our brains. Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff's theory of quantum consciousness link neurological quantum processes to our experience of consciousness.

As time emerges out of timelessness the boundary between the two becomes more intricate and complex. This is a fractal boundary. The "edge effect" is an example of a fractal boundary, where at the interface of two ecosystems, such as the edge between a pond and a field, the greatest biodiversity is found. Complexity is the intertwining boundary between two dualities, in this case, between time and timelessness. The fractal dimension describes the density of this intertwining. The more densely we involve ourselves in some activity, the faster time seems to go. The more shallow our involvement, the slower time seems to go. Laurent Nottale's theory of physical fractal space-time describes the process of quantum collapse while Susie Vrobel's theory of subjective fractal time describes our subjective experience of time using fractal measures.

By combining these theories I establish a link between physical fractal time and our subjective experience of fractal time describing the intertwining of time and timelessness. The infinite within the finite–this is the paradox that animates the world–eternity within a moment, the moment within eternity, and the whole body of the universe in between, chasing its tail.


Academic Abstract:
This dissertation applies Susie Vrobel and Laurent Nottale’s fractal models of time to understanding our subjective experience of time, deepening the interface of quantum mechanics and subjectivity developed by Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff. I first outline Penrose’s Objective Reduction (OR) version of quantum wave function collapse, and then the biological connection to microscopic brain structures and subjective states that Hameroff developed from Penrose’s theory. In the next section, I outline Nottale’s theory of scale relativity and fractal spacetime, covering his treatments of non-fractal classical time emerging from quantum, fractal, and reversible time. I then build on Vrobel’s model to identify specific properties of fractals, explore how they might model our subjective experience of time, and interface with the theories of Nottale and Penrose. At the confluence of these theories, I suggest aligning time with fractal scale. In this case, the data of the timeless present moment, like the fractal pattern, is condensed and replicated through memories, creating the fractal dimension, or temporal density, of the subjective passage of time. Thus, temporal flow unfurls from, and nests within, the timeless present. Finally, I consider the implications for the human relationship with time."

In this paper, I discuss an argument inspired by the relativity of simultaneity (RoS). That argument purports to establish views such as four-dimensionalism, eternalism and, chiefly, determinism. I will present the most important versions of the argument and point out the differences between them — including Gödel’s version and the idealistic view of time that naturally goes with it. Gödel’s version differs from the others in that he doesn’t endorse determinism. The argument depends crucially on how one interprets Special Relativity (SR). In addition, defenders of the argument make certain semantic and epistemic claims, which lead to an alleged incompatibility between indeterminism and our best theory of time. At the end, I will describe the main reactions to the argument and I will make some general remarks on each of them.

Keywords: Determinism; relativity of simultaneity; Andromeda paradox; eternalism.

Inspired by the Penrose-Hameroff thesis, we are intuitively led to examine an intriguing correspondence of 'induction' (by fields), with the complex phenomenon of (metabolism-sustained) consciousness: Did sequences of associated induction patterns in field-susceptible biomatter have simpler beginnings?

There are many layers to our understanding of the world. There are things that are immediate to our senses, which we know (or think we know). There are models we construct to explain, and which correspond with, the physical world that we sense, observe and measure. There are mathematical concepts we imagine that can be seen to be true in-and-of-themselves. But, over the last century, advances in science and mathematics have revealed many things we would like to know that we do not. Some have been proven to be impossible to know. FQXi has asked us to explore these limits in our ability to understand the world. How are these limits related and what do they mean? This essay addresses that challenge by exploring features that the physical world and mathematics share with consciousness. Self-reference, entanglement and purposeful agency are key features of autonoetic (self-knowing) consciousness. They are also found in physical and mathematical systems and are manifest at the limits of knowledge that FQXi is exploring. These autonoetic features serve as gatekeepers limiting our understanding of the world we live in, but they also make living in this world so marvelously interesting and beautiful.

The reason for this work was to reconsider our intuitive vision of the Penrose's mosaics, addressing them from Transcurssive Logic (TL). The aesthetic, and even artistic-decorative effects that these geometric developments generate, it is said, depend on their aperiodicity, being understood by it, the possibility of expressing their structure through functions that are repeated indefinitely, but not keeping the symmetry they have defined during over 170 years, for example, the crystalline structure of matter. In these mosaics, the existence of an "intrinsic beauty" is the product of sticking to a universal pattern, as the first cause of its particular appeal, beyond constituting a recreational application of mathematics, or a source of inspiration for the discovery of quasicrystals.

Stephen Hawking admired A.K. Raychaudhuri’s contributions to Physics. His contributions are widely recognized by the international scientific community. But AKR remains a hidden figure in his own homeland.

Link: http://nopr.niscair.res.in/handle/123456789/45371