I’m in the middle (still) of reading Kevin Kelly’s Book “What Technology Wants”. Enjoying it and finding it stimulating.
I’m reading the CBZ file in Comic zeal on the iPad. Nice. I’m about 50 pages into the 250.
Finding the free graphic novel, is interesting as it sort of ties in with his other themes. It is si-fi and the links back to the science are fascinating. I learned about Roger Penrose who I’d never heard of. There is a big debate obviously about consciousness, but from the wikipedia article I tend to go with Penrose. Thee is something weird about consciousness. I have an instinctive disdain for the value of neuroscience for psychotherapy – not for neuroscience but for the value people see in it for psychotherapy. However quantum science could change everything once we get the hang of it.
Its well done, a big collaborative production – with an interesting Kick-starter project for volume two.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Penrose
Penrose has written books on the connection between fundamental physics and human (or animal) consciousness. In The Emperor’s New Mind (1989), he argues that known laws of physics are inadequate to explain the phenomenon of consciousness. Penrose proposes the characteristics this new physics may have and specifies the requirements for a bridge between classical and quantum mechanics (what he calls correct quantum gravity). Penrose uses a variant of Turing’s halting theorem to demonstrate that a system can be deterministic without being algorithmic. (E.g., imagine a system with only two states, ON and OFF. The system’s state is ON if a given Turing machine halts, and OFF if the Turing machine does not halt, then the system’s state is completely determined by the Turing machine, however there is no algorithmic way to determine whether the Turing machine stops.)
