Slartibartfastibast

My day just got made like nobody's business...

In your interview with Cara Santa Maria you expressed the view that consciousness has little to do with nonclassical effects in the brain. However, in your interviews with Dr. Amit Goswami and Dr. Bruce Lipton you seemed sympathetic to less mainstream ideas like Penrose's Orch-OR (which apparently gets 9% of the vote in a poll of experts in quantum foundations).

Lockheed Martin (and the CIA) recently bought a working, scalable quantum computer (called the "D-Wave One") that solves hard problems that used to be exclusively tackleable through the application of trained human action. In short:

The D-Wave can get you quantum speedup for a range of tasks that humans are good at, but that classical computers (the digital ones, at least) are bad at. I have my own suspicions about the physical reasons for this, but suffice it to say that most of our cognition boils down to running a single algorithm [more info] that doesn't scale well on any of the hardware we've tried so far. Historically, we solved problems that required this algorithm (and, pre-digital revolution, problems requiring any kind of algorithm) by coming up with a cultural role and sticking a person in it (painter, blacksmith, photographer, architect, hunter, gatherer, etc.). When cheap digital microprocessors became ubiquitous they didn't fulfill the core computational requirements that had necessitated the creation of these roles, but they did speed up the rate at which old roles were replaced by new ones. This is because much of the instruction and training that defined previous roles involved getting people to do stuff that computers are naturally good at (hippies call this "left brained nincompoopery") and as computers got good at making computers gooder (Moore's law and such) cultural roles were more frequently changed to continue making efficient use of the capacities of the new machines. (Source)

My question: In light of the info above would you consider interviewing Sir Roger Penrose or Hartmut Neven (a Google employee) about their respective views on nonclassical happenings in the human brain (1, 2)?

Both Stuart Hameroff (Penrose's coauthor) and Hartmut talk about psychedelics (ayahuasca in the latter case) in lectures at Google.

Note: mikebonanno is Mike Bonanno, the other Yes Man.

Chamber Of Commerce Still Suing Yes Men Over Last Year's Prank (HuffPo, 2010)

I would LOVE to get either Sir Roger Penrose or Harmut Neven on the podcast.

Penrose seems comfortable with podcasts and unconventional interview environments. I think he could answer many of your deeper questions (e.g. supersymmetry "error correction codes" and the like) considering the work he's done with Stephen Hawking.