Roger Penrose
ROGER PENROSE  Macroknow Library
   

   
Shadows of the Mind.

"Understanding is, after all, what science is all about -- and science is a great deal more than mere mindless computation."1a PLATO ARISTOTLE DESCARTES PASCAL BERKELEY VOLTAIRE JAMES SANTAYANA RUSSELL POPPER ORWELL DRUCKER

" . . . the 'tilting' of light cones, i.e. the distortion of causality due to gravity, is not only a subtle phenomenon, but a real phenomenon, and it cannot be explained away by a residual or 'emergent' property that arises when conglomerations of matter get large enough."1b*

" . . . [Einstein's general relativity] theory is confirmed overall to an error of no more than about 10-14."1c EINSTEIN WIGNER

"The expectations of quantum theory were triumphantly vindicated . . ."1d PLANCK SCHRODINGER

"Gödel's argument does not argue in favour of there being inaccessible mathematical truths. What it does argue for, on the other hand, is that human insight lies beyond formal argument and beyond computable procedures. Moreover, it argues powerfully for the very existence of the Platonic mathematical world. 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."1e* PLATO WIGNER


     
   

* Italics in the original.

1 Roger Penrose. Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness. Roger Penrose, 1994. London, UK: Vintage, Random House UK Limited, 1995. First published by Oxford University Press, 1994.
a Preface, at vii.
b What New Physics We Need to Understand the Mind: The Quest for a Non-computational Physics of Mind, at 225.
c What New Physics We Need to Understand the Mind, at 230.
d The reference here is to the 1981 Paris experiment by Alain Aspect et al. What New Physics We Need to Understand the Mind, at 248. 
e What New Physics We Need to Understand the Mind: Implications?, at 418.

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