Testing A Time-Jumping, Multiverse-Killing, Consciousness-Spawning Theory Of Reality
Freeman writes:
"This retroactive idea. It has to be that," says Nobel Prize-winning mathematical physicist Sir Roger Penrose, reflecting on a problem about the building blocks of reality that has dogged physics for nearly a century. "Any sensible physicist wouldn't be perturbed by this," he adds. "However, I'm not a sensible physicist."
If Penrose isn't a sensible physicist it's because the laws of physics aren't making sense, at least not on the subatomic level where the smallest things in the universe play by different rules than everything we see around us. He has reason to believe this disconnect involves a fissure that divides two different kinds of reality. He also has reason to believe that the physical process that bridges these realities will unlock answers to the physics of consciousness: the mystery of our own existence.
Penrose's contributions to math and physics are significant. He's proposed a theory of sequential universes that existed before the big bang, traces of which seem to be penetrating ours. He collaborated with Stephen Hawking on the Penrose-Hawking singularity theorems, identifying points in the universe, singularities, where the gravitational forces are so intense that spacetime itself breaks down catastrophically.[...]
For decades, Penrose has been working with anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff on a theory of consciousness called Orchestrated Objective Reduction (Orch OR).
[...] Penrose demurs. He politely but unequivocally waves off the idea that a conscious observer collapses wave functions by looking at them. Likewise, he dismisses the view that a conscious observer spins off near infinite universes with a glance. "That's making consciousness do the job of collapsing the wave function without having a theory of consciousness," says Penrose. "I'm turning it around and I'm saying whatever consciousness is, for quite different reasons, I think it does depend on the collapse of the wave function. On that physical process."
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