Franky it's irrelevant. Penrose's insistence that the human mind isn't algorithmic in the Turing sense is born from his human insecurities. But if the human mind isn't bound in such a way, than any man-made computer need not be bound either. Penrose's argument falls short of being a proper dualist argument. Furthermore Roger Penrose has not proven his claims, and they are not supported by mainstream neuroscientists. He appeals to quantum woo that he pulled out of his ass.
It's not ok to argue like this on HN, so please don't. It lowers the quality of discussion in its own right and sets off a downward spiral from others.
Edit: Actually, we've banned your account. Your comment history shows that you've broken HN's civility rule so egregiously, and so repeatedly, that we should have banned it long time ago. If you don't want to be banned on HN, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and promise to follow the rules scrupulously in the future.
> I know that he disagrees the human mind is bound by physical laws.
Last I heard, Penrose appeals to quantum woo to claim that the human mind isn't strictly algorithmic. But sources of quantum randomness isn't enough to push you into dualism, quantum shit is part of our physical universe and while there is no proof that the human mind critically exploits quantum phenomena for it's computation, we can certainly build machines that have RNGs exploiting quantum randomness.
> Penrose appeals to quantum woo to claim that the human mind isn't strictly algorithmic.
Penrose doesn't appeal to quantum woo, he has a quite well articulated set of assumptions and arguments , related to loop quantum gravity [1], about how objective collapse of the wave function may occur at bio-physically feasible decoherence times.
Now, whether you think his biophysical theories of consciousness are valid, or even required (whether you buy the microtubules argument/hypothesis), is one thing. But stating that Penrose- arguably the 20th century's foremost mathematical physicist- is a practicioner and/or a spreader of 'quantum woo'-- that belies a level of mis-informantion so catastrophically high that it renders your quoted statement indistinguishable from a pure ad-hominem.
@Chronos (can't reply for some reason, so I'm just replying to my own post and tagging you)
Its true that LQG is not known a natural schema to implement hyper-computation. However, since we don't well understand the time-dynamics of twistors ( how these operators may interact non-linearly through time), i don't see any a-priori reason why it is not a possible scheme for super-computation (you could make a good counter- response based on occam's razor, which I'd grant).
Look, lots of thereotical CS folks get disturbed by the idea of hyper-computation/super-turing machines, but in truth Turing machines are a toy model in comparison to true physics; as such, it doesn't take a whole lot more to get something more powerful; Siegelmann and colleagues have shown that real weighted, analog recurrent nets have super-turing abilities [1] [2]. While Aaronson and other raise good questions about physical realizability of such systems, a good thing to keep in mind is that these discussions often take place at computational 'limit' cases, eg solving intractable PSPACE problems, which may not be as relevant to more pedestrian problems solvable by biological systems. Central point: dynamically evolving systems iteratively exploring through (from) in-consistent systems towards more and more consistent ones have many of the same compelling qualities we would call 'super-turing'. Also see the lit on evolving turning machines.
Finally, while I don't agree with the magnitude your Pauling analogy, I certainly agree with you statement that Penrose is out of his depth here. While I do not , presently, buy his argument that quantum effects are necessary to realize consciousness, I remain open to the idea until we know more about BOTH physics and computation.
LQG is not believed to allow hypercomputation, i.e. the solving of Turing-uncomputable problems. Penrose's entire argument is based on the idea that the human brain is a hypercomputer, which is why it cannot in principle be simulated by a computer (or any other machine).
It's worth noting that Penrose's field of expertise is General Relativity, not quantum physics, and definitely not Computer Science / philosophy of computation. I see the situation with Penrose as equivalent to Linus Pauling's unfortunate foray into Vitamin C pseudoscience late in his life.
Penrose' claim is much simpler. He thinks that gravity playing a role in wave function collapse will show that non-quantum computers are incapable of accurately modeling quantum gravity. IOW, he thinks gravity will end up showing the physical Church-Turing thesis to be false.
Say what you will about Penrose, but can you seriously deny that he is one of the world's foremost experts on gravity?? You might not like his conclusion, but to say that he is out of his element here is ridiculous. Are you in your element when discussing gravity causing wave function collapse? Who do you think would be more in their element on this subject than Penrose??
Call me back when Penrose convinces a well-regarded quantum physics expert. At that point we can call up Scott Aaronson and ask him his opinion, as Aaronson is an expert on the intersection of quantum physics and computing.
Scott is a friend of mine. I've talked with him face to face about this very subject. He disagrees with Penrose, but his objections are far more nuanced and respectful than anything I have seen here. He would be horrified to see Penrose belittled and his arguments not given a fair reading. Penrose is an intellectual hero to Scott and someone to be admired.
That's good to know. I read his post on his 'debate' with Roger and really enjoyed it. Also of interest may be the discussion between him and Hameroff in the comments section.
Meta-comment:
It a sad sort of situation when intellectual communities, whether they be HN or another, tend to idolize a set of individuals and demonize others.
Thanks @manyosos for your comments in this thread, you really helped elevate the discourse.
Your statement nailed it. I think that 100 years from now we won't be teaching biology and it's existing classification system of Kingdom/Phylum/Class, but something much more accurate based on genetics (i.e. DNA).
It might still fit the hierarchy, but the delineation will be much better aligned with nature.
Humans need classifications to easily understand and describe complex things. If you defined species in a continuous way, we'd have a hard time getting our heads around how similar these prehistoric "animals" were to ourselves. We'd have to describe their differences which would be quite complicated. Instead, we can coarsely group them into species as a quick mental shortcut for high level understanding.
Our discrete classifications actually match DNA-based clustering results pretty accurately. If you do multi-dimensional clustering on allele frequency at multiple loci, the clusters pretty much exactly match the species/subspecies classifications that humans use intuitively. Our discrete classifications don't cover all cases, but they're surprisingly good in the vast majority of cases.
> If you took the modal interface away from vim, you wouldn't have vim anymore. If you don't want a modal interface, don't use vim.
The vast majority of people don't use vim, so this "solution" has already been widely adopted. (Which in turn causes people who like vim to periodically wonder why more people don't use it.)
The problem comes because there are scenarios where you don't have a choice as to which editor to use; if you're shelling into a server with limited privileges, for instance, vi/vim may be the only even remotely modern editor available. So lots of people find themselves forced to use it, and these are the people for whom the Stack Overflow thread is useful.
> you don't have a choice as to which editor to use
Like... nano? Or pico? All quite broadly available, and easy as dirt to use. You can even use them to work with `visudo`, one of the few times where I could imagine you don't have a choice.
Also, if you can edit it remotely over SSH, you can scp it in two directions and use your own favorite editor (assuming that editor doesn't already have something like network editing already built in; most do).
If you "don't have a choice", you're not looking hard enough.
> The problem comes because there are scenarios where you don't have a choice as to which editor to use; if you're shelling into a server with limited privileges, for instance, vi/vim may be the only even remotely modern editor available. So lots of people find themselves forced to use it, and these are the people for whom the Stack Overflow thread is useful.
That doesn't sound like a reason to change vim, it sounds like a reason to change the configuration of the server to something saner. pico/nano makes sense to me, if the expected users are the kinds that wouldn't know how to exit vim or emacs.
SSHing into a server implies a basic level of technical competence. The user presumably already knows cd, mv, ls, and family. Why would expecting the user to know a touch of VIM be out of place?
That said, any server admin who for whatever reason allows people to SSH in (shared hosting maybe, university, file sharing) should have nano installed. Anything else is just cruel!:wq
What interactive terminal programs exit using ^C? Nano doesn't, top doesn't. There is no standard for interactive terminal programs. Furthermore ^C doesn't fit with the rest of vim's control schema, so you wouldn't really be doing anybody any favors in the long run.
> that no actual user of the software has? It's not an iphone, it isn't meant for use by the general public.
You're obviously wrong.
Millions of users of the software have that problem. It is used by the general public. It's irrelevant whether they intended to be users of the software or not. No one decides on a distro based on the default text editor, and some people are still learning how to use nix and won't know to change it right away.
Plus, from vim.org:
> It's not just for programmers, though. Vim is perfect for all kinds of text editing, from composing email to editing configuration files.*
Sounds like vim is for use by the general public to me. It just isn't very good at usability.
Perhaps an alternative is a "first run" mode which could do something like ask "did you intend to open vim? Y/N (answering N will close vim)". If you answer Y then you get a lesson in closing vim, if N then you always get the "first-run" mode until you answer Y?
The impact on vim users would be virtually nil whilst also respecting that non-vim users are caused problems. Who is most to blame is not usually the most helpful focus.
Zuck lacks more than just charisma. He lacks social competence. He'd be more like Jeb than Carson. He falls to pieces when he gets flustered, worse than most awkward autistic teenagers in front of a crowd of judgmental peers. Shit, Jeb might just make Zuck look smooth.
If you can explain why it's so bad somebody's medical info gets leaked out, I'm all ears. As far as I can tell HIPAA makes medicine more expensive. That's bad!
What if you could opt in to healthcare that was 20% cheaper, but was only subject to contractual promises of medical privacy, not the HIPAA. Would you take the deal?
Because he suggested that people be allowed to choose between privacy and cost? For some people, 20% might be a significant cost and they don't care about medical details leaking.
