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Arguing further Penrose says that
understanding is a quality that requires genuine awareness. He
also admits that he does not know what "awareness" is,
any more than he knows what "understanding" is.
"Yet, it seems clear that without awareness, genuine
understanding (in the usual use of that word) cannot be present.
To be fully aware of the situation is, indeed, the first step
towards understanding it. Thus, if we can see that the effects
of understanding are not achievable purely computationally, then
this strongly indicates that it may be awareness itself that is
the non-computational ingredient. In any case, if the effects of
understanding are beyond computation, from then there is
fundamentally lacking in the purely computational model of the
mind."
Penrose argues
that humans stood a better chance in the evolutionary struggle
because they had the ability to understand mathematics and could
compute. An ‘"understanding" of numbers could come
about in an entirely computationally describable way.
Accordingly, it was the computer-like response of our remote
ancestors to their environment that produced
"understanding". In their experiences they would have
come across small numbers of objects and then larger and larger
collections, finding that it was to their advantage (and to
their evolutionary "fitness") to be able to count them
consistently, and then to ad and subtract them.
This excellent
little book is a collection of lectures and interviews arranged
by the Centre for Philosophy and Foundations of Science (CPFS),
which has its main aim to bring philosophy and physics back on
the same road again. After parting ways and going their separate
ways about the time of Newton and Galileo, philosophy and
science seem to have come a full circle. It would surprise many
that these days, papers published in scientific journals may be
about subjects that were beyond the purview of modern science,
especially physics, and similarly in philosophical journals you
might find papers on general relativity and quantum mechanics.
For instance, most of us would not expect Roger Penrose, an
acclaimed mathematician and physicist, known for his work with
Stephen Hawking on black holes and the big bang to be concerned
about mind and consciousness. But that is exactly what he seems
to be dong, and doing it very well.
Later in an
interview with Ranjit Nair, Penrose sums up his position:
"The basic argument is that mathematical understanding —I
would like to use the word ‘understanding’ as the key word
in my own considerations— is beyond the scope of any
computation.
Take any
computer activity, and no matter how cleverly it can perform
elaborate functions, there is no understanding present in that
activity. Understanding requires awareness — it is one feature
of our awareness, and that’s the only one I can get a real
handle on. But from there I would say it is unreasonable to draw
a line between our understanding of mathematics and our
understanding of other things, for example, the appreciation of
a musical sound or a beautiful scene or the feeling of pain. All
these qualities are more obviously outside computation."
Along with the
question of mind and matter, there is also the perplexing notion
of time, and the issue is well addressed by E. C. G. Sudarshan
in the lecture "Does time go forward? It was Einstein who
changed our commonsense view of time by linking space and time
about a century ago. While addressing the question of time,
Sudarshan says, we find ourselves caught between two conflicting
theories: quantum mechanics and thermodynamics.
Mechanics tells
us that time does not travel in a linear fashion, (in other
words, there is nothing like past, present and future, just as
there is no reference point in the universe such as up or down
or north or south) that is there is nothing that has ‘happened’
cannot ‘unhappen’, while thermodynamics says processes do
not happen in the reverse unless there is external intervention.
Sudarshan wonders if there are irreversible processes in nature
and how could they be accommodated alongside reversible
processes?
Similar
questions are addressed in Ilya Prigogine interview with Ranjit
Nair "Creativity, change and time’s arrow".
Interested readers might find it fruitful to compare these two
with the chapter "The Arrow of Time" in Stephen
Hawking’s much acclaimed book "A Brief History of
Time".
Ranjit Nair’s
own lecture "Can science comprehend consciousness?"
deals with the fact that while all scientific enquiry is by
nature objective or third person narrative, the realm of
consciousness is actually a subjective or first person
narrative. Quoting Ervin Schrodinger he says, "The spirit,
strictly speaking can never be the object of scientific inquiry,
because objective knowledge of the spirit is a contradiction of
terms.
Yet, on the
other hand, all knowledge relates to the spirit or, more
properly, exists in it, and that is the sole reason for our
interest in any field of knowledge whatsoever." Nair
reminds us that Sankaracharya also believed that knowledge in
general has to be objective.
Here Nair also
forwards a counter argument to the principle of objectivity,
that knowledge is itself a kind of mental activity, and hence
could not be objective. Wilhelm Halbfass comments on the concept
of akasha or ether, one of the five elements as mentioned
in Indian philosophy, while Michel Bitbol discusses quantum
jumps.
Philosophy and science became
almost antagonistic towards each other so much so that, in the
age of Newton, as Ranjit Nair remarks in the editor’s note,
"Locke would have the philosopher serve as under-labourer
to science, while in the age of Einstein, Wittgenstein would
seemingly do away with philosophy altogether." But happily
for us, things are changing. This book reminds us that science
without philosophy is like computation without understanding.
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