A rather depressing interview. I enjoyed a lot of the explanations of Physics in *The Emperor's New Mind", but even there I could see big holes in his arguments about consciousness. For example, he talks about how its impossible to make an algorithm tile a grid in a certain way, but I had a screensaver which in fact did what he was saying was impossible. Here I just feel sort of sad and lost.
I think my least favorite line was probably this: "The trouble is, what can you do with it? Nothing. You want a physical theory that describes the world that we see around us." If you're going to use that to reject theories about the reality of the wave function, astronomers in the Renaissance would have been equally justified in rejecting the heliocentric system on account of it being at odds with what they saw around them, or Greek astronomers rejecting the notion that the world was round.
I think my least favorite line was probably this: "The trouble is, what can you do with it? Nothing. You want a physical theory that describes the world that we see around us." If you're going to use that to reject theories about the reality of the wave function, astronomers in the Renaissance would have been equally justified in rejecting the heliocentric system on account of it being at odds with what they saw around them, or Greek astronomers rejecting the notion that the world was round.