Quantum Consciousness Debate: Does the Wave Function Actually Exist? | Penrose, Faggin & Kastrup

As far as experiments are concerned, I think one has to be a bit cautious about it all. So I am not an expert on experiments, but I certainly have a colleague who, although the recent experiments you referred to seem to be supportive of the point of view I'm putting forward, he was a bit skeptical, thinking it might be a bit wishful thinking experiments. So I just have a neutral position on this.

I can't really judge the experiments and exactly how one might make observations, experimental observations to see whether they. Well, the argument will have to be that one has quantum effects in microtubules. These little tiny parts of cells.

And this has been the argument for quite a long time, ever since I had the communication Stuart Hameroff I'd written my book, The Emperor's New Mind, which was trying to put forward my viewpoint with regard to the consciousness. And at that time, I had no idea how you could find anything in the brain which seemed to support what I was doing. And it was interesting to hear from Stuart Hameroff who read my book and his job was to do with consciousness, namely to turn it off in a reversible way because he is an anesthesiologist he was at the time is now retired at the University of Arizona, and he introduced to me the notion of microtubules, of which I was completely ignorant previously.

I'm not a biologist. I am not a physiologist. I don't know the details of what's going on.

So I have to trust other people when it comes to that. But the arguments that I had originally came from mathematical logic. I had attended as a graduate student three courses that were nothing whatsoever to do with what I should’ve been doing, which had to do with pure mathematics, algebraic geometry at the time.

And one of the lectures I went to was a lecture given by a man called Steen on mathematical Logic, and he explained how the Gödel’s theorem worked and what compute the notion of computability. I learned from him too, as a definite thing in mathematics, and there are certain mathematical problems which don't have computable solution. I mean they have a solution of some sort but they’re not solutions that you compute on a computer.

So I was aware that there were such things and what I found most striking about Steen’s lectures was when he came to the Gödel’s theorems and I was a little bit disturbed by the idea of Gödel’s theorems, I heard about them before going to graduate work. And I wasn't very happy with the idea that it seemed to show there were things in mathematics you couldn’t prove. What I found reassuring was that the actual argument, the Gödel argument, is to show if you have any system of proofs that you accept as acceptable proofs and you could in principle put them on a computer, then what Gödel shows how you construct a sentence very clever way, which you could see is not provable by those rules.

But what struck me as most remarkable and most reassuring in a way was that your understanding of why the rules work enable you to transcend the use of the rules. So it's understanding why the rules work, which enables you to see why the Gödel theorem is true. You see that it is true, but not derivable by those rules.

But it is derivable by your understanding why those rules are actually correct. So the mathematical results. Well, yes, but I guess example, that particular example, probably the computers have grown in power since then and it may well be that they could solve that particular problem, that any specific problem in chess is a computable.

I think it’s around about that, yeah. I think I'm afraid I'm thinking that I have a very different view of the ones expressed by the other two or. Yeah, I mean, my view certainly is not that it's quantum mechanics because quantum mechanics, as we currently understand it, is well, as Einstein and Schrödinger have said about it, it's an incomplete theory.

I'm not as polite as they are, they were saying it's incomplete. I would say it's actually not even quite correct and is not correct because quantum mechanics as it currently exists does not have a theory of the collapse of the wave function. You see, you have standard quantum mechanics.

You have the description of the world according to a thing called the quantum state. The quantum state evolves, according to the Schrödinger equation, which is a deterministic equation, completely computable as well. However, it is not the way that the world evolves.

As long as your system is small and in some technical sense of the word small, then it does behave according to the Schrödinger equation. But when the system gets too big and I could be more explicit about what I mean by big, when it gets too big, then it doesn't follow the Schrödinger equation. You have this phenomenon of the collapse of the wave function, and my argument is that it's not just that quantum mechanics is important for consciousness.

Quantum mechanics on its own wouldn't give you consciousness. It's how quantum mechanics has to be extended to a better theory, as it exists, it is not would not explain consciousness. Quantum mechanics follows the Schrödinger equation and following the Schrödinger equation doesn't give you what I need.

You need something which goes beyond that, which is not computable. And this the argument is, has to be in the collapse of the wavefunction. So I'm arguing it's worse than quantum mechanics, if you like.

I'm saying what has to go on in the brain in the conscious being, whatever its brain is like, there has to be something which is not just evolving according to current quantum mechanics. It's evolving according to that theory. We don't yet have, which is the more complete theory in which the collapse of the wavefunction is part of that theory.

That needs to be there and current quantum mechanics doesn't have a theory of the collapse of the wavefunction. Very different from my point of view. Yes, well you say.

I would say the collapse of the wave function is a physical process, which is a long way away from explaining consciousness. And the physical process is something one can get towards. I have arguments which I put forward quite a long time ago to show that the two great theories of 20th century physics are the two great contributions, revolutions in quantum physics or A: quantum mechanics, which came first, and B: Einstein's general theory of relativity.

And what I am saying is that those two theories have an incompatibility. Quantum mechanics is based on the theory of a basic principle of superposition. You can have a particle in one location that's one quantum state or it could be another location.

That's another quantum state. And according to the basic principle of quantum mechanics, you can have states where it's there, and there at the same time, then you have all these superpositions between different alternatives. And that's very fundamental to the framework of quantum mechanics.

And the fact that you don't see most of these superpositions is not explained by quantum mechanics. Now, on the other hand, general relativity has its basic principle, which is the famous, well Galileo Einstein, principle of equivalence. Well Galileo explained it very well.

Imagine dropping a big rock and a little rock from the Leaning Tower of Pisa. And he knew that air resistance would make a difference and a feather would drop more slowly but if you had no air resistance they would fall complete together. So as they fall, there is no effect, you effectively canceled out gravity.

So gravity is the one force if you can call it a force, which I'm a little bit dubious about. It’s the one feature of physics which you can cancel by free fall, and that feature is incompatible with the principle of superposition. And you can make a little argument to show that they're inconsistent with each other and to make them consistent with each other, you have to introduce this collapse of the wave function.

It also gives you a measure of how much when you expect the collapse to take place. And it's not not a complicated problem, there's a formula I produced which was actually not original with me, because Lajos Diósi had already found this formula about two years earlier than I did. I wasn't aware of this work, but I had this particular argument to show that this estimation of how long it takes for the wave function to collapse is in accordance with what my argument if have an object, a big object to say like this, magnifying glass of mine and I put it in a superposition of here and here, that superposition would not last, would it be a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of a second.

If on the other hand, it's a carbon atom or something. And here and there. Well, it would probably, that superposition would last for longer than the age of the universe, so there was a genuine form in it which you can write down, which tells you how long that superposition would be expected to last.

Before it collapses to one or the other, and it has nothing at that level, nothing whatsoever to do with consciousness. It's a physical formula, something which could be measured in an experiment. It has not yet been because experiments, as they exist, have not quite reached the level of sophistication in order to do this.

There are experiments which are currently being done. I mean, not that they're not there yet, but they're aimed at looking at this effect. And my hope is that they will see this effect when they get a bit more sophisticated than they are just yet.

And it won't be too long when I say not too long, probably within the next ten years. Yeah, you can say it doesn't happen. I mean, that you have to have something which looks more or less like the classical world.

And if you don't have the collapse of the wave function, the quantum evolution of a state does not look like the classical world, it just doesn't. I mean, there are arguments which people use, which are sorts of approaches to this, but you can look carefully at these arguments and you see they don't do it. You have to have a development of quantum theory which has not yet been formulated as a complete theory.

All I can do is say the level at which I expect collapse to take place. I say the collapse. If you have a physical situation where the parameters are so and so, then I might expect collapse to take place within 10 minutes say, and that calculation could be done.

But it doesn't tell you exactly when it happens. It doesn't tell you which way the collapse happens. It doesn't give you a mechanism for collapse.

It's just a formula which tells you how long a system can remain in superposition before it collapses to one or the other. And the connection with consciousness, you see, in my view, is quite secondary and it's very important. I think I would certainly agree with both of you.

It's very fundamental in the way the universe operates. Consciousness is playing a big role, but it's a subtle role and it doesn't reveal itself until you have elaborate systems like living beings, some are animals. Maybe, for all I know plants might possess it to some degree, but I don't see it in inanimate objects.

They're not sophisticated enough somehow to take advantage of the collapse of the wavefunction, but for them it's just a random process. I think it could be. I mean, if we understand, well we need to understand the physics better, I would regard that as a small step.

We don't have the theory yet, but I would think within the next 50 years we will have such a thing. I think that tells us we will understand consciousness in that time and it's a much more sophisticated concept. But what I am saying is the other way around, whatever consciousness is, it's something which depends on that phenomenon.

So we're not going to have a physical understanding of what things in the universe are conscious. I mean even things like see you had mentioned Stuart Hameroff earlier, I think I mentioned him, but anyway the connection with the microtubules was something I learned from him and his job is an anesthetist or an anesthesiologist. His job was to put people to sleep.

Except he doesn't call it sleep. It's a different phenomenon. General anesthetics are particular substances and they have a very curious relationship to each other.

For example, xenon, which is an inert gas, doesn't seem to have much in the way of chemical interactions. Nevertheless, is a general anaesthetic. And what is the connection between these different substances which act as general anaesthetics?

As far as the chemistry is concerned absolutely nothing, it doesn't seem to be they are chemically connected. Nevertheless, there is some physical connection and the view is they do, in his view. And, I think he's probably right.

His view is that these general anesthetics do affect microtubules and it's the microtubular activity which probably does involve the collapse of the wave function. And their function is something which general anesthetics affect because that's a subject which is active at the moment and needs to be a lot of work to find out what's going on. But it's a long way from understanding consciousness, so I think that's a much more complicated problem.

Well, I think I mean, I think these things are very different. I think there's one confusion here, which I think I would like to get really rid off in a way. See in the early days of quantum mechanics, people worried about the collapse of the wavefunction, but not thinking of it as a physical process.

I mean, many people, including most, particularly Wigner, I think because I talked to him quite a lot when I was in Princeton, I had conversations with Wigner which were very interesting, and he had the view, as many others did, that somehow the collapse of the wave function was an effect of consciousness. Let’s just say, the terminology in quantum theory is very much suggestive of that because it says, you an observation, and this observation induces the collapse of the wave function now that you see. So it's rather suggesting that the collapse doesn't take place and there’s a conscious being comes along and looks at it, then that measurement that the conscious being makes by looking at it , if you’d like, collapses the wave function.

So it's as though it's the consciousness which causes the collapse of the wavefunction, that's very different from my views. It's almost the opposite, my view is saying. No, no, no, it's not that consciousness causes the collapse.

The collapse would take place quite independently whether there are conscious beings or not. And I can think of a particular example, just a sort of thought experiment, if you like. I imagine that there's a bit of a distant planet somewhere which is very, very much like the earth.

It just happens that no life, no conscious beings ever came about. But it’s otherwise like the earth. Now the weather on the earth is supposed to be very delicate, dependent upon very small effects.

So the people talk about the butterfly effect. If the butterfly wing flaps one way, then the weather goes one way and if it flaps a different way. Then the weather might have a completely different effect.

So it’s a thing, which means that the behavior of the system depends very, very delicately on the initial state. Okay. Now this planet that I'm imagining, has no life on it, no butterflies.

Nevertheless, you have weather on this planet. But since there is no conscious being or no beings, which collapse the wave function according to that view. Collapse of the wavefunction doesn't take place.

Therefore you have weather which is a superposition of all different weathers and you have a space probe which comes to this planet and takes a photograph of the weather on the planet. Now there's no being no conscious being on the space probe. It just takes a photograph.

Now, as it returns, it transmits this photograph, which is of a superposition of different weathers, and somebody on a big screen looks at the signal on the earth. And as soon as that being looks, that human being looks at the picture on the screen, suddenly collapse. The wavefunction happens because only then is there’s a conscious being become part of the system and then the weather becomes one with it.

To me, this is completely ridiculous. The weather is going to be one way ore another whether there's a being on it or not. It's not because of living beings on the planet, it's not because of consciousness on the planet.

It's because the collapse of the wave function is a physical process which takes place when things become large enough, superpositions become large enough in a way in which that can be very explicit about if necessary what I mean by large enough and it would collapse the wave function quite independently of conscious beings. Well there you see there is a very important development in my thinking, which I don't quite know when I first thought it, within the last five years I would say certainly, I think the first thing I ever talked about it. There was a conference in Arizona.

I think that the idea got developed since then, that you can't talk about reality quite like that. There are two kinds of reality. There's quantum reality and classical reality, and they are not quite the same.

And quantum reality behaves in a way which is quite strange. The notion of quantum reality actually comes from Einstein in a certain sense. He talked about the quantum state.

He said: Is the quantum state real or not? And a good example is the spin of a split in a half particle, take an electron Now, the spin of an electron, the different possible spin states are spin right handed about all possible directions so I can move my thumb about the axis and it spins right handed about that axis. Now all those different possible states, those are the possible spin states of an electron.

Now what you can't do is ask the electron: What’s your spin state? Or you can try, but it doesn't give you any answer because that's a quantum reality. However, if you do have a theory which says by now the electron ought to be spinning, say, about that particular direction and it has all but the same amount.

That's an electron. It's always the same amount, about that direction. Now what I can do is I can confirm it, and this is Einstein's criterion.

I can say to the electron, I'm going to measure the electron spin in that direction, and if I have it right, it will say, yes, you got it right with 100% certainty and it will not disturb the system. You can measure it again and again and again. And each time it says yes, if I measure it in a different direction, it will give you a probabilistic answer, it’ll maybe say no, maybe yes.

Depends on you doing experiment many, many times and will give you different answers. Now, the quantum state is something you can confirm in a sense that you cannot ascertain. You have to make a distinction between confirming and ascertaining.

Ascertaining would be something you say: Hello state which way you spin? It doesn’t answer questions like that. But you can explain these rather puzzling things, which is what Einstein was worried about.

In fact, these things called Einstein Podolsky Rosen experiments. Where you can have a spin state which is shared by two observers or two people. Let’s call them widely separated.

And you know what? The total spin each one has a spin half particle, which has come from a spin zero initial state. And so they have to be opposite each other.

Not one of the individuals measured the spin in some direction that instantly makes it the opposite, actually worse than instantly. It goes backwards in time along the past lightcone and the other ones is fixed by the measurement made by the one and the other one. If that other one could ascertain what the state was, you would then have a contradiction you could send signals faster than light, but you can’t send signals faster then light.

It would lead you into contradiction with relativity. What you could do is confirm that state if the other person knew what the measurement first one that made, then that measurement would be confirmed, it cannot be ascertained. If you could ascertain it, you could send signals faster than light, which would lead you into real trouble.

Relativity wouldn't work, it would be real trouble. However, you can make this the quantum reality if that state is projected backwards along the past lightcones it goes not just simultaneously, but even back in time. But since that's only quantum reality, you cannot ascertain what that state is.

So you have to make a distinction between the quantum reality which cannot be ascertained but it can be confirmed, classical reality can be ascertained. So you can ask the state what it is and it tells you what it is. So as a solution, it is something which is has to be made when you talk about reality.

So reality. When you talk about quantum mechanics, the notion of reality you've got to be careful about. It's not like classical reality where there isn’t any contradiction Well you see it is not reality.

It's quantum reality. It's not reality. See, that's the trouble When the quantum world is ‘reality’ That lead to a confusion about this.

Not many worlds. No, I'm against it. Well I have to be careful about this.

I have I have a point of view. This has to be taken in the right spirit. But my point of view is that it's a good thing to have had in certain stages of your life, to have believed in the many worlds interpretation of quantum physics.

The shorter period the better. I did go through such a state myself believing it in the many worlds interpretation and I hope, I can't remember how long it was, whether it was as long as a year. I am not sure.

Well you say no, the theory is not really complete, or you have to understand that these notions of reality are more subtle. And without having the quantum mechanical picture, you see I don't think. Philosophers could argue with each other endlessly without realizing this way, this strange way in which quantum states behave, and I think spin is a good example, and well this is the Bohm version of the Einstein Podosky interpretation, but I think Einstein wanted to do it that way originally.

But I think Podosky talked him out of it. You're talking about the reality of the world in some sense. Can we talk about the reality of the world in an objective way?

Is that the sort of question you mean? Well, I think there are some subtle differences here you see. Okay.

Philosophers and physicists worry about different things. Well, I'm not quite sure, let me know. You see, the computability issue is a separate question.

I mean, that's that's a mathematical problem, whether you can compute the thing from a physical theory, actually, I’m not. Also, when you talk about Qualia, I mean, we don't know. I mean, is the sensation of blueness common to different people?

If I see a blue entity that creates a certain impression on me and somebody else looks at the blue thing and does that person have anything that you could say is the same as my experience? I would just say, we don’t know. It could well be that there is something indeed to tell, which isn’t to say.

We certainly don't know enough about that. I find very curious things like synesthesia, where you have parts of the brain, if they get mixed up, then one sensation gets sort of confused with another sensation. It does seem to be there was something different between one kind of sensation and another kind of sensation, which may be a universal thing.

It may be that different people might say philosophically, How can you ever know? Well, maybe someday we will be able to know. And maybe there is something about blueness, redness of greenness or something which is universal.

And if you have synesthesia of some kind, maybe some people would see the blueness as green and so on, possibly I have no idea. I can't see anything against that tough. But it seems quite possible that these sort of sense of qualita, if you like, are things which have some objective physical basis.

I don't know. I'm not trying to claim that that's the case or not. I certainly think that as a pleasant level of understanding, we are a long way from that and we can talk about it with a more philosophical lens.

This one person has a certain sensation of so and so, and that's individual to that being, and it's meaningless to say it's the same as what somebody else feels. I don't know any answer to that. I really think there could be an objective.

Oh, I see. Now, that's a slightly different question. Yes, I would say it has an existence, an objective existence.

Well, sure, if somebody proves the theorem, I mean, Andrew Wiles proved that there were no x to the n, that you can have a sum of two squares which is another square, but there's no other power which the sum of two of that powers gives you another thing which has the same power I mean, that's mathematical statement and that would be true. Whether the universe had different physical laws and it's completely independent is a mathematical statement is objectively true. How we come across to understand why it is true, maybe very difficult question, very few people really understand, how many people have gone through Andrew Wiles proof for example?

I mean, not many, but I've never been through it for example. But I still think he's right that Fermat's Theorem is established is objectively true and if you had a different universe, or not even a different universe I'm not sure what that means exactly, but I could imagine the universe with physical laws which are not the same as ours, and they contemplate the possibility of conscious beings in their universe, possibly I don't know enough about physics to know how unique these physical laws are. And could you change the parameters which we have in our physical laws, with some other numbers and another perfectly good laws of physics, where the physical properties would be different possibly, we don't know, but the mathematical laws will be the same.

So things like whether you have a sum of two powers which are the same, but that's going to be the true in whatever universe you are in. I think that is what you are referring to? Whether the mathematical world is an objective, well independent of us has existence.

Yeah, yeah. Maybe, but I don't know. Of course, I knew Wheeler quite well but he was a hard person to understand, and I always find it rather difficult.

He was always very polite and everything. I find if you talk to him, you have a question or you talk to him. And his reply would be about 37 and a half degrees away from your question making that figure is not an exact number, of course, but it was always angled away from what you thought and it was quite strange in some ways, so interesting.

But yes. I don't know. I got lost after a while.

He kept talking about it’s from bits and things like that. And I think I lost at that stage. I guess it got to philosophical, like I have to say, I, I don’t know, I just find it difficult to, I think quantum mechanics confuses people too much.

That's the trouble and I think probably confuses people is not quite for the reasons people think. It's partly because you have these two kinds of reality you can't really ask of a quantum state. You can't measure what a quantum state is and it's the same thing I said before.

You can't you can't ascertain the state. You can only confirm it so if you think you know what it ought to be by now, then you can do an experiment very, very precisely test whether you got it right or not, but if you don't have any concept of what the quantum state is. Well, it may be that, you can't ascertain it with these Einstein Podolsky Rosen types of experiments.

You have to, and I'm taking the view that you have to take this more, with quantum mechanics. There is a notion of reality which doesn't come about until you think about quantum mechanics, I don't think pure philosophy gives it. It's not a notion which comes from philosophical thinking.

It's a notion that comes from physics. And it's interesting and different from what we tended to think before but reality is something, we might have mentioned it, I've expressed myself on that before. Yeah, it's it's very clear.

Well, you see, I think it's not I mean, that is an interesting question, because it doesn't seem to me necessary that consciousness is causal in some sense I can imagine somebody being paralyzed completely. I get this happens. People are completely paralyzed and nobody can tell whether that person is actually conscious or not.

And later on, you find that person may wake up at some sense and you find they were conscious all the time. They knew what was going on. It's just they couldn’t influence anything in some sense this notion of being.

We have a free will in the sense of affecting things is not so obviously a necessity. But what I mean by you can I can imagine one can have a subjective experience without being able to use that to affect in a way. It seems to be something a little different, to be able to use one's consciousness in an effective way, is a little bit different from actually having consciousness.

Now I'm not sure I would want to identify them perhaps as strongly as I think as maybe you're suggesting. Right? So it's not causal power because if you have this person who is in this state, forget the technical term, but who is simply aware of what's going on but has no control over motions and things like that.

That person is still conscious. Yeah, that's right. You can't do anything with it, but that's a different question.

I would agree that clearly it does exist and I think I agree with you there. It's the fact that it can have a causal effect. Is the only reason why beings have evolved with it and, as you said, there would be no point in beings involved who had consciousness.

If it had no effective influence on the world for sure. I think that's absolutely essential, but it doesn't seem to me it's quite the same thing as being aware. Is that question for me?

Yes. Sorry to you. Yeah.

Yes, well have had thought a little bit more about free will I've often thought I don't really know what it means, but I think I would like to say that I have a better idea. What I think it might mean, and it depends on you see, you could say sometimes people think free will as oh, you can have a will to do anything kind of being random. Something like this.

I keep being reminded that when I was growing up my little brother was two years younger than I was, and he could beat at pretty well any game. But the thing that disturbed me the most, he could beat me at paper, stones and scissors, you see. Now, I thought that games of pure game of chance how could he beat me that game.

So I went away and I got hold on a table of logarithms in my father's study and I made a little table. Three means this and so on, and so I’d make a long strip and I would follow this strip and simply do what the strip said. And then I broke even so, I got relieved.

It's not that he was magic, and I think it's just that he knows his patterns. when I was trying to be random you see so free will is different from randomness. You see, sometimes people suggest that free will means that you could do what you like and therefore there's a sort of randomness in it.

And I think that's the wrong way of looking at it. I’m not saying that this is your point of view But I am saying that it's if you like, the free will is to you. See if I think action A is preferable to action B and I have used my consciousness to work it all out and I say, no action A is probably the better thing to do.

And then when the moment comes, then I do that action A. And I'm doing the action A because I had the free will that was involved in my understanding of which is better to do it is not that like when you touch the stove, it's hot you pull you hand away and thing like that which are clearly not free will actions. Something where you're using your consciousness in a way which involves your understanding of what's the right thing to do.

It's more like that, but it's not a complete answer to the question but. The thing is, I don't know. You see, I think consciousness is certainly not restricted just to humans.

That I am certain of. how far down? If I can use the word down in the animal kingdom, even plants, and how far does it go.

See I think, I think. But even dog owners are very convinced that their dogs are conscious, I believe that is correct. I have no reason to disbelieve that.

I think that dogs are conscious. I think that elephants are conscious. I think octopuses are conscious they don’t have to be mammalian at all.

But whether an ant is conscious or not, I wouldn’t worry about that. Maybe, maybe not. Whether a honey bee is conscious, maybe a better chance, I think it might be, they do complicated things.

They seem to be able to even do simple arithmetic apparently. So how far down, if I could use the word down in the animal kingdom, it goes. I have no idea.

I think it probably goes pretty far down whether a bacterium could be considered to be conscious. I would be much more dubious about that, but I’m only guessing. Well, it's got to be something.

So I do think it's got something to do with the quantum state. And since I argue it to be to do with the collapse of the wavefunction, then you got to have a wavefunction to collapse and big wave functions collapse more than little wavefunctions in a certain sense. So according to such a view, you'd have to have quite a big coherent object.

You see, it's wrong. Probably to think of individual cells, it's probably a collective effect. I mean, many quantum effects are like that.

When you talk about some superconductivity, there are many in quantum effects which are quite big. And in a certain sense extensive of quantum fluidity, and things like that. Sure, so it's not just thinking individual atoms, how much does each atom have and add it up?

That's not the. . .

it's got to be something much more connected I don't think that my view is changed on the whole. The trouble is that you can get divisive I think that whether that being conscious, these devices will not actually, well put it the other way around, but they won’t be intelligent, and I think AI is a misnomer. So it means artificial intelligence.

The fact that one calls it AI, is rather suggestive, but to suggest that you just have your powerful enough computer and then it will become actually intelligent. For me, this goes against the initial argument which I was trying to make at the beginning of this discussion came from the lectures given by Steen, which I formulated my viewpoint there what he showed is that that your understanding really is not a computation, that you can you can put it in as much in the way of computational power. You can the thing make play chess, or make it play go so that it would be making its moves better than any human being, that it's quite possible.

But does it understand what it's doing? Well, it would have to be conscious to understand what it’s doing. Of course it's hard to formulate this because what does it mean to say you understand something.

I might perform in such a way that it looks as though as if it understands it. And the trouble is that I could imagine that the technology will get to such a degree that it's very hard to tell whether or not it's conscious, it doesn't mean that it's conscious. And I certainly would argue that a computational system, in other words, computer let me use the word.

Computer, that that's what we mean after all. Computer in the sense that we mean it which is a computational system, will not ever be intelligent, doesn't mean that it couldn't simulate the intelligence to a degree that you might be fooled by it. And it's a difficult question.

And I would say that AI, and it has its dangers. The dangers are not that it will take over and become more intelligent than us, the dangers are that it would be misused, in ways in which it could fool us. Well, that sort of stuff I still have my books.

because I don't want to throw them out. But I have a difficulty that I can barely read because my eyesight, I have macular degeneration, which means I have to magnify that hugely in order to see it I should probably put one of these reading devices on my computer which could read to me. I haven’t done that yet Trying to, yeah.

It gets more difficult as I get older, I think yes. I get tired more easily. I has been great, I've enjoyed it too, yes.