Does the Wave Function Actually Exist? | Penrose, Faggin & Kastrup

Two giants of science and technology—Nobel Laureate in physics, Sir Roger Penrose, and inventor of the microprocessor, Federico Faggin—meet to discuss their ideas on the relationship between Quantum Physics and consciousness, with the special participation of our own Bernardo Kastrup. While always respectful and congenial, the participants don't shy away from disagreements. Their starting difference regards Quantum Theory itself: while Federico Faggin and Bernardo Kastrup allow its implications to inform their views, Sir Roger Penrose believes the theory itself to be at least incomplete and require further development. The discussion helps pin down and make explicit the fine points of the three gentlemen's respective ideas regarding consciousness.

04:29 Introduction of the speakers
05:48 Roger Penrose's theory and recent empirical findings in favor of it.
16:32 Bernardo Kastrup on the main differences between Roger Penrose's and Federico Faggin's views.
19:48 Roger Penrose responding to Kastrup's and Faggin's interpretation of quantum mechanics.
22:23 Federico Faggin on Penrose's view that quantum mechanics is an incomplete theory.
25:43 Roger Penrose on the idea of the collapse of the wave function as a free will decision.
30:38 Bernardo Kastrup responding to Penrose's ideas around a unifying theory and objective collapse
32:14 Kastrup telling Penrose collapse isn't real.
34:31 Could a unifying theory point to the fundamentality of consciousness?
37:10 Faggin replying to Penrose's objections to the idea of consciousness being primary.
39:55 To Roger Penrose: Is it fruitful to pursue the route of saying consciousness is fundamental?
44:42 Kastrup on a false dichotomy in collapse interpretations
54:11 Can we get from syntax to semantics?
57:57 Faggin on what qualia are
59:33 The ontology of Roger Penrose: does mathematics 'exist' ontically?
1:04:18 On Wheeler's participatory universe
1:13:51 Is there any point to consciousness without free will?
1:17:15 Is consciousness restricted to brains?
1:21:26 What defines the human?
1:26:37 Al is a misnomer it's not intelligent
1:29:15 Closing remarks

This was not the best debate hosted by Essentia Foundation in my opinion. It seemed like Roger Penrose and Federico Faggin talked past each other.

Roger Penrose is clearly physicalist. I was never sure about his position before this interview.

This was not the best debate hosted by Essentia Foundation in my opinion. It seemed like Roger Penrose and Federico Faggin talked past each other.

Roger Penrose is clearly physicalist. I was never sure about his position before this interview.

He explicitly talks about mathematics being distinct from the physical in the interview when asked if Math is ontically real? He also explicitly says he doesn't know if qualia have physical basis, just that he thinks it is possible in a more complete physics.

That would match up with his Why Are We Here interview:

... one of the things I spent a lot of time worrying about has been the issue of consciousness. And so I have these three worlds in a sense: you have the mathematical world, and then the physical world here. And the laws of physics seemed to be governed by mathematics, but it's only a part of the mathematical world, as far as we know, which governs the laws of physics. And it's only a part of the physical world, as far as we know, which has conscious experiences...

So he would be a Platonist at minimum due to his views on Maths. Beyond that he seems agnostic as to whether the Physical can produce Consciousness, though he has - AFAIK - said his self-proclaimed "prejudice view" (in The Road to Reality) is that the physical is dependent on the mathematical, and the mental is in turn dependent on the physical.

He does himself note that his position does leave the curious issue that the mathematical is known to us only by way the mental.

IIRC among his more explicit claims to Platonism are in Emperor's New Mind:

Platonic reality of mathematical concepts?

How ’real’ are the objects of the mathematician's world? From one point of view it seems that there can be nothing real about them at all. Mathematical objects are just concepts; they are the mental idealizations that mathematicians make, often stimulated by the appearance and seeming order of aspects of the world about us, but mental idealizations nevertheless. Can they be other than mere arbitrary constructions of the human mind? At the same time there often does appear to be some profound reality about these mathematical concepts, going quite beyond the mental deliberations of any particular mathematician. It is as though human thought is, instead, being guided towards some eternal external truth — a truth which has a realitv of its own, and which is revealed only partially to any one of us.

The Mandelbrot set provides a striking example. Its wonderfully elaborate structure was not the invention of any one person, nor was it the design of a team of mathematicians. Benoit Mandelbrot himself, the Polish-American mathematician (and protagonist of fractal theory) who first studied the set, had no real prior conception of the fantastic elaboration inherent in it, although he knew that he was on the track of something very interesting. Indeed, when his first computer pictures began to emerge, he was under the impression that the fuzzy structures that he was seeing were the result of a computer malfunction (Mandelbrot 1986)! Only later did he become convinced that they were really there in the set itself. Moreover, the complete details of the complication of the structure of Mandelbrot's set cannot really be fully comprehended by any one of us, nor can it be fully revealed by any computer. It would seem that this structure is not just part of our minds, but it has a reality of its own. Whichever mathematician or computer buff chooses to examine the set, approximations to the same fundamental mathematical structure will be found. It makes no real difference which computer is used for performing calculations (provided that the computer is in accurate working order), apart from the fact that differences in computer speed and storage, and graphic display capabilities, may lead to differences in the amount of fine detail that will be revealed and in the speed with which that detail is produced. The computer is being used in essentially the same way that the experimental physicist uses a piece of experimental apparatus to explore the structure of the physical world. The Mandelbrot set is not an invention of the human mind: it was a discovery. Like Mount Everest, the Mandelbrot set is just there!

I don’t think he sees the physical world as merely a shadow of the real world, even though he might entertain Platonistic thoughts about mathematics. In fact, I would think his views on mathematics are common among mathematicians and physicists. 

He clearly embraces the idea of an objective reality, citing Einstein's view that the moon exists whether or not anyone is observing it. His solution to the problem of wavefunction collapse is his objective-reduction process, which he argues is caused by the influence of gravity. In his view, the wavefunction is ontologically real. This theory is also his proposal for a grand unified theory of both gravity and quantum mechanics, though he acknowledges it is not yet fully developed.

Regarding qualia, he suggests that we don't know whether the experience of "blue" for person A is the same as for person B. At the very least, he seems quite agnostic about the nature of consciousness, though from the interview, I got the impression he believes it arises as a physical process in the brain.

The trick is the dual usage of the word "exists".  There is a sense of the word where exists means physically real to be detected.  It can also mean an idea.  So no, wave functions are not physical and do not exist materially/energetically - and yes, wave functions are real in terms of measurement of probability.  If you believe, as I do, that there is an environment of informational probability the answer is clear, that wave function calculations are real as to natural events. 

Never heard of Faggin before. In the video I've posted above he recounts his Spiritually Transformative Event (STE) at the opening of the interview, roaring out of him, and tingling/vibrating all over. Then a few minutes later @10:19 he recounts that the 'knowing' which came from his STE arrived because he asked a question. Much later after his STE, Faggin now understands the question that he was asking, [or perhaps better described as how he was asking his question], as being a prayer.

I instantly recognize what he is describing about asking his question, as being the same as what I was doing in my run up to my kitchen STE in early 2021. I can't say I label it as a prayer, as I don't know what a prayer is. But I describe that day as total surrender to not knowing the answer, whilst asking the question, and refusing to answer it for a long period of time. I describe the refusal to answer my own question, as not closing off my question. Refusing to close it off, but holding it in awareness, whilst also refusing to answer it myself, . I also know it was a 'felt' question, I could feel my surrender, a very strong, very certain and carefully deliberate strength of feeling.

Then I got whisked out of the kitchen, enormous, and had a vision and a strong feeling, and returned back into the kitchen, with something roaring up and down my spine and out of the top of my head, vibrating and in absolute ecstasy.

I can't say that I understand or agree with the rest of his ideas, but his experiences are very different to mine, and so the narrative that makes sense to him, probably won't make as much sense to me.

[Laird]

This was not the best debate hosted by Essentia Foundation in my opinion. It seemed like Roger Penrose and Federico Faggin talked past each other.

Agreed. They each had interesting things to say in their own right though. I was more appreciative of Frederico's take on the mind-body problem, but Roger had some very interesting things to say about physics and quantum mechanics in particular. Bernardo offered some eloquent and (what seemed to me to be) accurate bridging statements.

Watching the video that Max shared, I am not sure that I'm totally on board with Frederico's theory, but it's interesting that despite being a monism, it wholeheartedly endorses the reality of NDEs and survival.