Disclaimer: this thread is not about (Orch) OR, I will try to definitively answer all relevant points about OR w.r.t. the studies in the OP in this post, but I will not discuss it any further.
TeethWhitener said:
But the human programmer comes up with the entire algorithm, including the brute force calcuations. Why do we get to include the brute force and exclude the insights? (Do we exclude, e.g., the idea of point values for various pieces? That's an insight in itself, not intrinsic to the rules of chess.) Is the hypothesis that some problems are more difficult to solve with brute force than with some special insight really that controversial?
See my post above about dual process theory.
Whether it is controversial or not is irrelevant, the question is what has been mapped out already and what has not. Chess seems to be a wonderful natural experiment for investigating such matters seeing it is mathematically well understood and can easily be played mentally giving only pictures to the subject and asking them to verbalise their thoughts, giving a very clean way of empirically distinguishing reasoning processes in vivo, which is also generalizable to other mental activities.
The hypothesis paraphrased:
P1) All (directly explicit) algorithmic action, calculation and computation are tasks of purely type 2 reasoning.
P2) Understanding (or comprehension) is a form of type 1 reasoning.
P3) Human reasoning does not solely consist of type 2 reasoning, we are also capable of type 1 reasoning.
P4) Computers or Turing machines or clearly non-conscious adding machines like abaci and calculators, strictly perform tasks that belong to type 2 reasoning.
C) Therefore such machines can not fully simulate human understanding.
It has already been demonstrated that brute force reasoning falls squarely under the type 2 reasoning tasks and it is therefore scientifically, i.e. from the point of view contemporary experimental psychology, completely uninteresting to study it further in humans. It should also be abundantly clear that competent chess players do not play chess purely by utilizing brute force, but also by using type 1 reasoning; to insist on investigating such matters w.r.t. the current hypothesis is to attempt an empirically sterile in vitro artificial experiment.
What you are asking isn't about the hypothesis at hand. Moreover, there actually seems to be two very subtle points at play here:
1) insight has both an operational definition (from psychological theory) and an informal definition; to conflate the two definitions is to construct and attack a strawman argument
2) you also seem to be confusing the hypothesis which is a de re statement (some human reasoning is such that it is necessarily non-computational) for the de dicto statement (necessarily, some human reasoning is such that it is non-computational). These are two distinct hypotheses.
I'm sure it does, but maybe not for the reasons the linked article alluded to. If they want to study the "flash of insight" by fMRI, why do they need a task which is hard for computers? How is that at all relevant? A particularly thorny tactical problem in a standard middlegame might induce a flash of insight for a person but be relatively trivial for a strong chess engine to solve.
That is extremely relevant, in fact that is the entire argument: they want to study such flashes of insights in real time and so experimentally map their neural characteristics. This has already been done for forms of type 2 reasoning.
The bias is grounded in decades of people taking Penrose's predictions, actually experimentally testing them, and falsifying them. I'd say that's pretty scientific.
Which specific predictions? Many of the takedowns I've seen (Feferman, Churchland, Grush, Dennett, Tegmark, etc) are strawman arguments, indirect arguments or failures to comprehend the argument altogether. Moreover, I believe there might an actual direct takedown from the point of view of logic which has not been given any large degree of coverage. Almost all of the experimental 'takedowns' have been addressed in the 2014 review of the theory.
More importantly, Penrose' hypothesis of human understanding being seemingly a non-computational activity is fully consistent with contemporary experimental psychology findings; he only happens to use somewhat different terms, him of course not being intimately familiar with the fields specific jargon or its modern empirical theories such as dual process theory. What this means is, he has incidentally rediscovered a hypothesis which happens to have already been investigated and has survived being falsified.
Perhaps most importantly, all of the above has nothing, in principle, to do with gravitational objective reduction (OR) theory, Orch OR or twistor theory. These are all experiments which stand or fall on the basis of their own merits. These results say nothing about his further hypotheses that I) understanding requires awareness, II) awareness requires consciousness, III) the mechanism of proto-consciousness is mass-dependent gravitationally induced OR of the wavefunction, IV) human consciousness is neuronal microtubules undergoing gravitational OR in an orchestrated fashion.
Scientifically, with regard to physics, OR is a falsifiable scheme and there are multiple experiments underway to falsify it.
There have been no experiments which have falsified OR yet, the latest estimates by experimentalists places us at years if not decades away from being able to carry out the required experiments. All that can be said at the moment is that the experiments will either demonstrate superposition from orthodox QM persists at all mass scales up to macroscopic masses or show a regime where QM fails and some form of OR will point in the direction of the new theory. That is really all that is relevant at the moment.
It is only after the experimental parameter space at each scientific level has been mapped out carefully enough, that eventually some deeper physical theoretical explanations for psychology, such as Orch OR or some other competing theory, may be required and thus pointed out.
This thread was not meant to discuss (Orch) OR, so I hope this post has addressed all relevant scientific issues about it with respect to the research in the OP.
I'll immediately admit my bias :P
The man is one of the major reasons I went into physics in the first place. He is without reserve or question a genius, one with a remarkable breadth and depth of knowledge, a dispassionate independent mind with a healthy philosophical curiosity and an equally healthy dose of humility - all good qualities for a scientist, and for a mathematician very reminiscent of the universalists of old. Saying any of this does not jeopardise my scientific integrity; I and many others have said far crazier things about the likes of Newton and Einstein.
To quote Feynman:
Feynman said:
What is necessary for the very existence of science is just the ability to experiment, the honesty in reporting results, and finally, the intelligence to interpret the results, but, an important point about this intelligence is that it should not be sure ahead of time about what must be.
Now, it can be prejudiced and say, “That’s very unlikely; I don’t like that…” Prejudice is different than absolute certainty–bias, but not strict bias, not complete prejudice. As long as you’re biased it doesn’t make any difference because, if the fact is true there will be a perpetual accumulation of experiments that perpetually annoy you until they cannot be disregarded any longer. They can only be disregarded if you are absolutely sure ahead of time of some precondition that science has to have. In fact it is necessary for the very existence of science that minds exist which do not allow that nature must satisfy some preconceived condition.”
Lastly, there have actually been several extremely great mathematicians who have focused on the issues of human psychology, philosophy of mind and their relationship to mathematics. Two prominent mathematicians who have written extensively about these issues which I have read are Poincaré (The Foundation of Science) and Hadamard (An essay on the psychology of invention in the mathematical field). I highly recommend these two books to any mathematically inclined person. It is a veritable shame that this type of research has fallen out of repute with the shift of the intellectual world capital out of Europe during the darker years of the 20th century and the simultaneously occurring over-specialisation/balkanisation of science and its subsequent professionalisation.
Of course, there have also been many mathematicians who have written a lot of plain mystical nonsense regarding these topics, most painfully noticeable major figures like von Neumann and Wigner. In either case, I believe a historical reading of Penrose' work, especially his clarified position in Shadows of The Mind and his further errata, safely places him among the former intellectual group instead of the latter more mystical group, and his works on these issues can be seen as a natural evolution of the earlier debate on many of these issues earlier brought to prominence by Poincaré, Hadamard et al. The argument that he is a mystic because he has associated with known charlatans like Chopra is equally empty as Feynman being one too because he frequently associated with not only new age types but also with hippies, stoners, strippers and gamblers.