The Thought:
Say consciousness is a flame. If our flame sputters, how is it that we still feel like ourselves when we wake up from anaesthesia? How do we manage it even just from one moment to the next? Idk, but I bet the no-cloning theorem is involved.
The Penrose Proposition:
There are problems, like tiling the plane, which people can solve easily, but a computer can’t. It would take them literally forever, no matter how many, how big, or how fast. Why is that? Because consciousness is not a classical computation. Neither is the collapse of an entangled wave function. Let’s see if that’s just a coincidence, shall we?
How I imagine Sir Rodger Penrose might describe OrchOR
The Quantumicity of Me:
Quantum information, says our very best math, can be easily moved and changed, but not created, copied, or destroyed, it’s all from the big bang. If OrchOR is right that my consciousness is a quantum information entaglement that pulses in the molecular states of my biology, then it must be preserved through time, not copied or recreated, so I’m right to recognize myself in my memories.
The problem with time:
In all the equations of physics you can flip time’s arrow around all you want as long as you keep track of the minus signs. Except for entropy If you saw a reel of icecubes forming in somebody’s drink at the pool, you’d know you were watching it in reverse because everybody knows the second law of thermodynamics by one name or another. Time marches on and you can’t unring a bell. In an open system, entropy always increases.
What even is entropy?
Imagine your drink is enormous, and it’s sitting inside a giant lottery-ball blower thing. Little ping-pong ball air molecules are constantly crashing into the ones churning in the morphing conga-lines of your cocktail. Sometimes one makes off with a little extra jiggle, sometimes the other, like stealing someone’s bounce on a trampoline. One gets sucked in, another spews out, some just link arms and sit down to shiver. Maybe one will get excited enough to get back up and dance, or just fly away. They also do the opposite, like ice forming in your drink. Individually, they are doing all of that all the time, collectively, though, heat always from from warm to cold, never the other way around. When it’s hot the ping pong balls hit hard enough that they pass some entropy back and the ice melts, the water boils. When it’s cold, they are lazy and just steal all the bounce from the congalines and rain or freeze out, leaving a bunch of their entropy behind to eventually find its way out as blackbody radiation.
The time of our lives.
A good definition of life might be: “a closed system that metabolizes entropy to get work done, including self-replication, by turning highly ordered energy, like sunlight, into heat entropy.” We go forward in time, because that’s how the ship of life works; it’s an entropy engine that chugs along through time, using special reactions to pump our chaos out into the world, with consciousness surfing the bow wave.