"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"
About this Quote
Penrose is doing two things at once here: staking a philosophical claim and reminding you it came from a physicist who’s used to being right for measurable reasons. By anchoring his argument in The Emperor's New Mind, he invokes a deliberately provocative frame: the fairy tale where everyone agrees to see what isn’t there. The subtext is a warning that the reigning computational story of mind might be a fashionable consensus rather than an earned conclusion.
The phrasing matters. “Some years ago” softens the posture of a manifesto, but it also signals durability: this wasn’t a passing hot take about AI, it was a long-held dissent. “Point of view” sounds modest, yet it smuggles in an insurgent thesis against a dominant 20th-century idea that mental life is, at bottom, information processing. When he says consciousness is “not something that comes about from complicated calculations,” he’s not denying that brains compute; he’s rejecting the claim that computation exhausts what experience is. Complexity, in his telling, is a decoy: you can scale up algorithms forever and still miss the ingredient that makes subjective awareness feel like anything at all.
Contextually, this is Penrose as a public intellectual picking a fight with strong AI, functionalism, and the comforting notion that mind is just software on biological hardware. His broader wager - tied to Gödel, non-computability, and speculative physics - is that consciousness may require principles we haven’t formalized yet. It’s a contrarian move with rhetorical bite: if he’s right, “smart enough” machines aren’t inevitable; they’re conceptually incomplete.
The phrasing matters. “Some years ago” softens the posture of a manifesto, but it also signals durability: this wasn’t a passing hot take about AI, it was a long-held dissent. “Point of view” sounds modest, yet it smuggles in an insurgent thesis against a dominant 20th-century idea that mental life is, at bottom, information processing. When he says consciousness is “not something that comes about from complicated calculations,” he’s not denying that brains compute; he’s rejecting the claim that computation exhausts what experience is. Complexity, in his telling, is a decoy: you can scale up algorithms forever and still miss the ingredient that makes subjective awareness feel like anything at all.
Contextually, this is Penrose as a public intellectual picking a fight with strong AI, functionalism, and the comforting notion that mind is just software on biological hardware. His broader wager - tied to Gödel, non-computability, and speculative physics - is that consciousness may require principles we haven’t formalized yet. It’s a contrarian move with rhetorical bite: if he’s right, “smart enough” machines aren’t inevitable; they’re conceptually incomplete.
Quote Details
| Topic | Artificial Intelligence |
|---|
More Quotes by Roger
Add to List
