Roger Penrose

Physicist, Mathematician

Quotes by Roger Penrose

"A scientific world-view which does not profoundly come to terms with the problem of conscious minds can have no serious pretensions of completeness." - Roger Penrose

"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." - Roger Penrose

"I believe that the problem of quantum measurement should be faced and solved well before we can expect to make any real headway with the issue of consciousness in terms of physical action-and that the measurement problem must be solved in entirely physical terms. Once we are in possession of a satisfactory solution, then we may be in a better position to move towards some kind of answer to the question of consciousness. It is my view that solving the quantum measurement problem is a prerequisite for an understanding of mind and not at all that they are the same problem. The problem of mind is a much more difficult problem than the measurement problem!" - Roger Penrose

"What is particularly curious about quantum theory is that there can be actual physical effects arising from what philosophers refer to as counterfactuals-that is, things that might have happened, although they did not in fact happen." - Roger Penrose

"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." - Roger Penrose

"Consciousness is the phenomenon whereby the universe's very existence is made known." - Roger Penrose

"The problem of conscious awareness is indeed a scientific one, even if the appropriate science may not yet be at hand. I strongly support this viewpoint; I believe that it must indeed be by the methods of science-albeit appropriately extended in ways that we can perhaps only barely glimpse at present-that we must seek our answers." - Roger Penrose

"I do not see how natural selection, in itself, can evolve algorithms which could have the kind of conscious judgements of the validity of other algorithms that we seem to have." - Roger Penrose

"Another example of a class of well-defined mathematical problems that have no algorithmic solution is the tiling problem. This is formulated as follows: given a set of polygonal shapes, decide whether those shapes will tile the plane; that is, is it possible to cover the entire Euclidean plane using only these particular shapes, without gaps or overlaps?" - Roger Penrose

"It is in mathematics that our thinking processes have their purest form." - Roger Penrose

"There seems to be something non-algorithmic about our conscious thinking. In particular, a conclusion from the argument in Chapter 4, particularly concerning Gödel’s theorem, was that, at least in mathematics, conscious contemplation can sometimes enable one to ascertain the truth of a statement in a way that no algorithm could." - Roger Penrose

"Mathematical truth is not determined arbitrarily by the rules of some 'man-made' formal system, but has an absolute nature, and lies beyond any such system of specifiable rules." - Roger Penrose

"I argue that the phenomenon of consciousness cannot be accommodated within the framework of present-day physical theory." - Roger Penrose

"There are considerable mysteries surrounding the strange values that Nature's actual particles have for their mass and charge. For example, there is the unexplained 'fine structure constant' ... governing the strength of electromagnetic interactions, ...." - Roger Penrose

"If we try to make general inferences about the theoretical possibility of a reliable computational model of the brain, we ought indeed to come to terms with the mysteries of quantum theory." - Roger Penrose

"Yet despite the fact that gravity is different from other physical forces, there is a profound harmony integrating gravity with all of the rest of physics. Einstein's theory is not something foreign to the other laws, but it presents them in a different light. (This is particularly so for the laws of conservation of energy, momentum, and angular momentum.) This integration of Einstein's gravity with the rest of physics goes some way to explaining the irony that Newton's gravity had provided a paradigm for the rest of physics despite the fact, as Einstein later showed, that gravity is actually different from the rest of physics! " - Roger Penrose

"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" - Roger Penrose

"Either individually or in these larger arrays, microtubules are responsible for cellular and intra-cellular movements requiring intelligent spatiotemporal organization. Microtubules have a lattice structure comparable to computational systems. Could microtubules process information?" - Roger Penrose

"Intelligence requires understanding, and understanding requires awareness." - Roger Penrose

"In some Platonic sense, the natural numbers seem to be things that have an absolute conceptual existence independent of ourselves." - Roger Penrose

"Though it indeed seems reasonable to rule out space-time geometries with closed timelike lines as descriptions of the classical universe, a case can be made that they should not be ruled out as potential occurrences that could be involved in a quantum superposition." - Roger Penrose

"Mathematical understanding is something different from computation and cannot be completely supplanted by it. Computation can supply extremely valuable aid to understanding, but it never supplies actual understanding itself." - Roger Penrose

Persons shown on this website are not affiliated with or materially involved with the ConscioCentric Paradigm. Their writings, teachings, publications or quotes have been influential to the ideas of ConscioCentrism.

Roger Penrose

Quotes by Roger Penrose

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