Don't take the title too literally. It's an article aimed at lay people, using a typical lay person's expression as the title.

I disagree. The human brain is difficult to understand due to the extreme complexity. Quantum mechanics is weird even for simple arrangements of a few building blocks such as the double-slit experiment or Bell tests.

Quantum physics is a theory, as in "as far as we can tell, this is an exact mathematical description of the world".

Models are simplifications/approximations made on purpose, as in "I know this is wrong on some level, but it's close enough for my use case", or "this makes the maths solvable".

One problem with your analogy is that transformers do not even attempt to model the human brain, while Quantum Mechanics does attempt to model real physics.

> All models are wrong

That famous quote could use attribution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_models_are_wrong

> If you make the error of believing that quantum mechanics is ontological god’s honest truth of nature

This is why science & experiment exists. The author holds no such belief, and the paper makes that very clear. That is what he actually meant by “I Don’t Understand Quantum Physics”. Jump to the very last section, “Is Quantum Theory Correct and Complete?” He’s pointing out the confusing and contradictory nature of the model so far, and saying that Quantum is incomplete and needs work. He is not making any category error.

I think the vast majority of physicists have been perfectly able to avoid Penrose's error. I would also think the lesson would be simply to strive to avoid making errors or the kind he did, not necessarily to sacrifice realism about physical objects just to avoid the possibility of someone's mistake. Plenty of people, in fact I would say many more people abuse the observer effect in QM to make crackpot claims about consciousness. But it doesn't mean the observer effect is wrong.

I also think you can be a realist without having to make the jump to ontological irreducibility. You can say that our latest theory is a better approximation than the previous one and the previous one was an approximation as well.

What a strange statement. Quantum mechanics is a physical model of the world. Attention and transformers are not. They can be construed into one in principle, but they are not models of the world themselves.

Yes, but even with a model, you should aim for some serious intuition as to how and why it works.

Penrose has fallen into the same logical fallacy that many older, retired theoretical physicists have (notable einstein?).

> It doesn't. It's model. All models are wrong (including quantum mechanics and attention) but some are useful.

Sure, but what if you don’t understand the model?

Somehow hacker news makes the top comment about some weird unrelated ai take. So unrelated. The take mostly doesn't make sense either.

Your username checks out. Time to shine?

There are only a few things that I think are exactly correct in physics, and quantum mechanics is one of them, alongside Relativity.

Quantum mechanics is a framework for how theories are built, not a specific theory, and it's really all or nothing. There's not much between the quantum and classical ways of viewing the world.