Quotes from Roger Penrose

But I think it is a serious issue to wonder about the other platonic absolutes of say beauty and morality.

As for morality, well that's all tied up with the question of consciousness.

So what I'm saying is why don't we think about changing Schrodinger's equation at some level when masses become too big at the level that you might have to worry about Einstein's general relativity.

I think I am intrigued by paradoxes. If something seems to be a paradox, it has something deeper, something worth exploring.

The idea is if you use those two shapes and try to colour the plane with them so the colours match, then the only way that you can do this is to produce a pattern which never repeats itself.

When I was in Cambridge reading mathematics, I went to Amsterdam for the International Mathematics Congress. There I saw M.C. Escher's fascinating work. That inspired me to try my hand at drawing such impossibilities.

A computational device is incapable of developing a mind. We got consciousness not just by being clever.

There is a certain sense in which I would say the universe has a purpose. It's not there by chance.

I used to make polyhedra with my father. There were no clear lines between games and toys for children and his professional work.

My father came from a Quaker family. His father was a professional artist who did portraits - very traditional, a lot of religious subjects.

Some years ago, I wrote a book called the Emperor's New Mind and that book was describing a point of view I had about consciousness and why it was not something that comes about from complicated calculations.

My younger brother ended up the British chess champion 10 times, a record.

I was indeed very slow as a youngster.

If you come from mathematics, as I do, you realize that there are many problems, even classical problems, which cannot be solved by computation alone.

Sometimes it's the detours which turn out to be the fruitful ideas.

If you didn't have any conscious beings in the world, there really wouldn't be morality but with consciousness that you have it.

Ordinary photons do have spin, they have a notion of helicity so they spin around their direction on motion.

Well, gauge theory is very fundamental to our understanding of physical forces these days. But they are also dependent on a mathematical idea, which has been around for longer than gauge theory has.

A computer is a great device because it enables you to do anything which is automatic, anything that you don't need your understanding for. Understanding is outside a computer. It doesn't understand.

If the computer-guided robots turn out to be our superiors in every respect, then will they not find that they can run the world better without the need of us at all? Humanity itself will then have become obsolete.

Might we… be doing something with our brains that cannot be described in computational terms at all? How do our feelings of conscious awareness – of happiness, pain, love, aesthetic sensibility, will, understanding, etc. – fit into such a computational picture?

Some people take the view that we happen by accident. I think that there is something much deeper, of which we have very little inkling at the moment.

Some people take the view that the universe is simply there, and it runs along - it's a bit as though it just sort of computes, and we happen by accident to find ourselves in this thing. I don't think that's a very fruitful or helpful way of looking at the universe.

I would say the universe has a purpose. It's not there just somehow by chance.