I liked the post, partly the mouse/cat/dog sentence but especially this:
He took a two-page argument about things he knew little about, spread it across 200 pages, and filled the gaps with tangential statements of impressive rigor and thoroughness on things he was expert in.
Penrose did roughly the same thing in The Emperor’s New Mind. I mentioned this on OB a while back:
If you read his book he gives a fantastic pop science explanation of all kinds of subjects around computing, coding, and quantum mechanics and so on, up to the inclusion of a crowning moment of awesome when he gives an actual universal turing machine, bit for bit, that is his own design as far as I remember.
After hundreds of pages of this he gives about two pages of hand waving argument nominally related to Goedel’s Incompleteness Theorem that completely drops the ball and is just gibberish when it comes to proving that human consciousness is uncomputable. He argues that since mathematicians can all agree about Goedel’s Incompleteness Theorem, they must be doing something more than merely mechanically formal and thus their consciousness must be something outside the powers of a turing machine. The pages and page of quantum backstory is ignored—I think its just there in an “argument by putting impressively difficult material next to your actual claims”.
I liked the post, partly the mouse/cat/dog sentence but especially this:
Penrose did roughly the same thing in The Emperor’s New Mind. I mentioned this on OB a while back: