The Hard Problem Versus the Easy Problem of Consciousness

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David Wheeler: Do you think that this way of thinking about quantum wave function collapse in the brain would help us understand the process of experience, the first person's subjective view?Wheeler: I have this short discussion with David Chalmers. He was complaining because I was saying basically, the view that Stuart and I have is that whenever one of these collapse processes takes place, that's where the state decides to be one or the other. You see, but we call that as always accompanied by a moment of proto-consciousness. It doesn't have any purpose at that level, but it's the thing out of which consciousness is built. That's what it's a point of view,

Sir Roger Penrose has had a remarkable life. He has contributed an enormous amount to our understanding of general relativity, perhaps more than anyone since Einstein himself -- Penrose diagrams, singularity theorems, the Penrose process, cosmic censorship, and the list goes on. He has made important contributions to mathematics, including such fun ideas as the Penrose triangle and aperiodic tilings. He has also made bold conjectures in the notoriously contentious areas of quantum mechanics and the study of consciousness. In his spare time he's managed to become an extremely successful author, writing such books as The Emperor's New Mind and The Road to Reality. With far too much that we could have talked about, we decided to concentrate in this discussion on spacetime, black holes, and cosmology, but we made sure to reserve some time to dig into quantum mechanics and the brain by the end. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.