Consciousness, collapse and tokens
Consciousness cannot be an algorithm In 1989, Roger Penrose — British mathematical physicist, the one who proved black holes are inevitable in general relativity, Nobel Prize 2020 — publishes The Emperor’s New Mind1 and makes a claim that infuriates half the academic world: human consciousness is not computable. The reasoning goes like this. Gödel proved that for any sufficiently powerful formal system, there exist truths the system cannot prove. If the brain were a computer — a formal system executing algorithms — there would be things we couldn’t understand. But we do understand them (mathematical insight, for instance). Ergo: the brain is doing something no algorithm, given any amount of time and memory, can ever do. ...