80 Quotes by Roger Penrose

Consciousness ... is the phenomenon whereby the universe's very existence is made known.

It is always the case, with mathematics, that a little direct experience of thinking over things on your own can provide a much deeper understanding than merely reading about them.

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

It may well be there is something else going on in the brain that we don’t have an inkling of at the moment.

Understanding is, after all, what science is all about – and science is a great deal more than mindless computation.

Well, I don’t know if I can comment on Kant or Hegel because I’m no real philosopher in the sense of knowing what these people have said in any detail so let me not comment on that too much.

Thus, Godel appears to have taken it as evident that the physical brain must itself behave computationally, but that the mind is something beyond the brain, so that the mind’s action is not constrained to behave according to the computational laws that he believed must control the physical brain’s behavior.

It is hard to see how one could begin to develop a quantum-theoretical description of brain action when one might well have to regard the brain as “observing itself” all the time!

Well I didn’t actually see the Matrix but I’ve seen other movies where with similar sorts of themes.