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What it argues
The Emperor's New Mind is Roger Penrose's argument that human consciousness cannot be reproduced by any computational device — that the mind is not, in the relevant sense, a computer — and that understanding consciousness will require fundamental advances in physics, particularly in reconciling quantum mechanics with general relativity. The title takes aim at strong artificial intelligence proponents who, Penrose suggests, are claiming the emperor's mind is clothed in computational algorithms when, on his account, the emperor is naked.
The book's philosophical centerpiece is Gödel's incompleteness theorem. Penrose argues that Gödel showed that no consistent formal system can prove all mathematical truths, and that a mathematician can see the truth of statements that no algorithm running within that system could prove. If humans can do what algorithms cannot, then human mathematical insight is non-algorithmic. This would mean consciousness — or at least the aspect of it responsible for mathematical understanding — lies outside computation.
What it gets right
- 1.
Gödel's incompleteness theorem shows that no consistent formal system can prove all true statements within it, which Penrose takes as evidence that human mathematical insight is not purely algorithmic.
- 2.
Strong AI — the thesis that a sufficiently complex computer program can be conscious — fails because it assumes consciousness is computational, and Penrose argues there are aspects of mind that lie outside computation.
- 3.
The physical laws governing the brain at the level relevant to consciousness may be neither classical nor standard quantum mechanics but may require a theory not yet discovered, connecting quantum and classical physics.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Roger Penrose is an emeritus professor of mathematics at Oxford University and one of the most distinguished mathematical physicists of the twentieth century. He shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics with Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez for work on black holes, and previously collaborated with Stephen Hawking on the Penrose-Hawking theorems on spacetime singularities. His other books include Shadows of the Mind, The Road to Reality, and Cycles of Time. Penrose is widely known both for his fundamental contributions to physics and mathematics and for his controversial views on consciousness.
