People parody Penrose's argument as "there are two things we don't understand: quantum gravity and consciousness. Therefore there must be related." And I think this is entirely fair :-) Cris On Aug 3, 2013, at 3:41 PM, Marc LeBrun <mlb@well.com> wrote:
="Dan Asimov" <dasimov@earthlink.net> [...] There are two striking aspects of the universe that are so difficult to address that physics can't touch them (so far): a) the flow of time, and b) conscious awareness. These two things must be very closely related. But very mysterious.
Maybe I'm just being too densely mechanistic, but I find the popular idea that consciousness is somehow closely related to deep physics puzzlingly unmotivated.
Other smart folks (eg Roger Penrose) also assert things along these lines, but I can't begin to follow these arguments because conscious awareness just seems to me a natural consequence of animals evolving the ability to create and manipulate models.