Penrose’ Orchestrated OR characterised as stalinesque, question

Thanks to an announcement from Louis Kauffman, I arrived to watch the recent talk

Sir Roger Penrose and Dr. Stuart Hameroff: Consciousness and the Physics of the Brain, Roth Auditorium – Sanford Consortium for Regenerative Medicine, La Jolla, CA

I am not a fan of consciousness research, because I believe it is too early to jump to the highest level of a huge building; let’s concentrate first, I say, to understand biological life (which we don’t). Consciousness studies often neglect the basis and they obscure very promising research avenues, like how does life exists as an asemantic decentralized computation… while in the same time cartesian homunculi are kept in various disguises. My opinion!

Physics, on the other hand, that’s something I am a big fan, so I started to watch the very interesting, indeed, talk by Penrose. At the meta level, I was amused by the repeated orders to the invisible human and computer machinery to change the slides while in the same time arguing that it cannot be computation what the brain does.

Then I arrived to a point in the talk where I saw that Penrose uses an argument from Dennett, but for physics. It intrigued me because I used the same argument ten years ago, but I was not aware about Penrose’ Orchestrated OR theory.

So the question is pure vanity: who used the argument first?

I asked the following and I got no useable answer, therefore I am looking in the community for help. Or maybe you were not aware about it and we can talk about it.

According to Penrose his Orchestrated OR is a stalinesque theory of physics (exact moment in the speech is this) and I find this characterisation intriguing, therefore I ask you for help with more information.

AFAIK is Dennett who uses the characterization of theories (of brain function) which explain illusions as orwellian, stalinesque or multiple drafts. It is straightforward to apply Dennett’s classification to theories of physics arXiv:1011.4485 and I was not aware about Penrose Orchestrated OR, nor about his characterization as stalinist.

The question I have is: maybe Dennett imported this classification from something Penrose wrote before? If not, is there any evidence about Penrose using Dennett?

Here is the (mouse copy-paste from pdf) passage from arXiv:1011.4485 I mention, where quotes are from Dennett:

“

From the description given at [17], such theories can be characterized as:

• (a) orwellian – ”the subject comes to one conclusion, then goes back and changes that memory in light of subsequent events. This is akin to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, where records of the past are routinely altered.”

• (b) stalinesque – the ”events would be reconciled prior to entering the subject’s consciousness, with the final result presented as fully resolved. This is akin to Joseph Stalin’s show trials, where the verdict has been decided in advance and the trial is just a rote presentation.”

• (c) multiple drafts – ”there are a variety of sensory inputs from a given event and also a variety of interpretations of these inputs”. From [16] [there is] ”no central experiencer [who] confers a durable stamp of approval on any particular draft”.

Translated into the physics realm, this gives several interesting interpretations.

• (a) Such a path has been pursued in physics, by Everett’s Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics [19]. More precisely, concerning interpretations of the collapsing of the wave function which are compatible with Everett theory, see Deutsch [18] and Stapp [24]. [Let me add here, in 2021, the following completion. A superficial view would be that Many-World Interpretation is rather akin to (c) multiple drafts. This is false because the Many-Worlds Interpretation is opposite to multiple drafts. Indeed, the multiple drafts and many worlds could be confused as “multiple drafts” and “multiple worlds”, but this would confuse “world” with “draft”. It is a serious confusion, one more which can be traced back to the confusion of things (like drafts) and objects (like worlds). See for more Wittgenstein and the Rhino. We don’t need a new world, or universe, to propose and interact within a draft.]

• (b) In more general terms, not related especially to the problem of the discrete versus continuous nature of reality, we can see any theory based on extremality of an action like being of this type. However, probably due to my ignorance, Iam not aware of physical theories supposing that a discrete reality conspires to give (to any observer) the appearance of being continuous. More precisely, such a theory would take as starting point a discrete reality where discrete things happen, in the limit when the graininess goes to zero, like in a continuous reality. One big and fundamental difficulty would be then to give a reasonable mechanism of how is this possible.

“

What is your opinion about this?