Quotes from Roger Penrose

Science and fun cannot be separated.

Well, I don't know if I can comment on Kant or Hegel because I'm no real philosopher in the sense of knowing what these people have said in any detail so let me not comment on that too much.

My father himself was a human geneticist who was recognized for demonstrating that older mothers tend to get more Down syndrome children, but he had lots of scientific interests.

This book is about physics and its about physics and its relationship with mathematics and how they seem to be intimately related and to what extent can you explore this relationship and trust it.

Intelligence cannot be present without understanding. No computer has any awareness of what it does.

Consciousness ... is the phenomenon whereby the universe's very existence is made known.

With thought comprising a non-computational element, computers can never do what we human beings can.

Understanding is, after all, what science is all about — and science is a great deal more than mindless computation.

The image of Stephen Hawking - who has died aged 76 - in his motorised wheelchair, with head contorted slightly to one side and hands crossed over to work the controls, caught the public imagination as a true symbol of the triumph of mind over matter.

And these little things may not seem like much but after a while they take you off on a direction where you may be a long way off from what other people have been thinking about.

What is it that we can do with conscious thought that cannot be done unconsciously? The problem is made more elusive by the fact that anything that we do seem originally to require consciousness for appears also to be able to be learnt and then later carried out unconsciously (perhaps by the cerebellum

What the Second Law indeed states, roughly speaking, is that things are getting more 'random' all the time.

Every one of our conscious brains is woven from subtle physical ingredients that somehow enable us to take advantage of the profound organization of our mathematically underpinned universe-so that we, in turn, are capable of some kind of direct access, through that Platonic quality of 'understanding', to the very ways in which our universe behaves at many different levels.

According to strong AI, it is simply the algorithm that counts. It makes no difference whether that algorithm is being effected by a brain, an electronic computer, an entire country of Indians, a mechanical device of wheels and

Technology provides the potential, by use of well-produced books, film, television, and interactive computer-controlled systems of various kinds. These, and other developments, provide many opportunities for expanding our minds-or else for deadening them. The human mind is capable of vastly more than it is often given the chance to achieve. Sadly, these opportunities are all to frequently squandered, and the minds of neither young nor old are provided the openings that they undoubtedly deserve.

Thus, Godel appears to have taken it as evident that the physical brain must itself behave computationally, but that the mind is something beyond the brain, so that the mind's action is not constrained to behave according to the computational laws that he believed must control the physical brain's behavior.

The more deeply we probe the fundamentals of physical behaviour, the more that it is very precisely controlled by mathematics.

It will be one of my purposes, in later arguments, to show that there is indeed an aspect of 'genuine understanding' that cannot be properly simulated in any computational way whatever. Consequently, there must indeed be a distinction between genuine intelligence and any attempt at a proper computational simulation of it.

I can at least state that my point of view entails that it is our present lack of understanding of the fundamental laws of physics that prevents us from coming to grips with the concept of 'mind' in physical or logical terms

People think of these eureka moments and my feeling is that they tend to be little things, a little realization and then a little realization built on that.

It is always the case, with mathematics, that a little direct experience of thinking over things on your own can provide a much deeper understanding than merely reading about them.

The ultimate behaviour of these matter distributions, taking the form of massless radiation (in accordance with CCC's §3.2 requirements), can then leave its signature on the crossover 3-surface, and then perhaps be readable in subtle irregularities in the CMB.

Awareness, I take to be one aspect-the passive aspect-of the phenomenon of consciousness. Consciousness has an active aspect also, namely the feeling of free will.

The gravitational field itself contains energy, and this energy measurably contributes to the total energy (and therefore to the mass, by Einstein's E = mc^2) of a system. Yet it is a nebulous energy that inhabits empty space in a mysterious non-local way.