The Large, the Small and the Human Mind (Canto) [Paperback]

Roger Penrose (Author), Malcolm Longair (Editor), Abner Shimony (Contributor), Nancy Cartwright (Contributor), Stephen Hawking (Contributor)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0521785723 | ISBN-13: 978-0521785723 | Publication Date: April 28, 2000 | Edition: 1st

Roger Penrose's views on the large-scale physics of the Universe, the small-scale world of quantum physics and the physics of the mind are controversial and widely discussed. This book is a fascinating and accessible summary of Roger Penrose's current thinking on those areas of physics in which he feels there are major unresolved problems. It is also a stimulating introduction to the radically new concepts that he believes will be fruitful in understanding the workings of the brain and the nature of the human mind.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Will quantum physics let us reduce consciousness to computation? Roger Penrose says "no" with great force and eloquence in The Large, the Small, and the Human Mind. Prepared as a series of three lectures in Cambridge's Tanner Series on Human Values, the material is both meticulously thought out and informally presented, including many illustrations by Penrose and others. For publication, the author sought out rebuttals and commentary by philosophers Abner Shimony and Nancy Cartwright, as well as his own colleague and occasional rival, the well-known theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking. Penrose then reserves the last word for himself, an author's prerogative. The result is a sharp but polite argument on the nature of thinking and its reducibility. Readers familiar with The Emperor's New Mind and Shadow of the Mind will find the arguments from quantum physics fleshed out in greater detail, but also attacked with good-natured aplomb. Those who missed out on Penrose's older forays into this territory (or are somehow uninterested in the nature of thought) will find this an excellent broad overview of the modern conception of physics, from subatomic shenanigans to the radius of the universe, as well as a stimulating debate among several great modern thinkers. Despite Penrose's certainty that our brains can't be modeled by computational systems--and hence that strong artificial intelligence will remain in science fiction--the argument continues, and will continue for some time. The Large, the Small, and the Human Mind crystallizes that debate for readers who want to keep up with the latest thinking about thinking. --Rob Lightner

From Kirkus Reviews

Lectures by a renowned mathematician and physicist on the connections of relativity and quantum theory (the science of the very large and the very small), with an eye to understanding the nature of the mind. Penrose has been over this ground before (in The Emperor's New Mind, not reviewed, and Shadows of the Mind, 1994), and his contention that artificial intelligence is an impossibility has generated a good deal of controversy. Here he reiterates and extends his essential arguments and invites refutation from a trio of critics in related disciplines: Abner Shimony, Nancy Cartwright, and Stephen Hawking. One central point of debate has to do with the relation between mathematics and the ``real universe''--or, as Penrose puts it, between the physical and the platonic worlds. A popular view of how science works is that the scientist, looking to explain a series of observations, finds a mathematical relationship that accounts for the data. Penrose argues that this view has things backwards: The mathematical relationship is the reality, and the data merely an expression of it. Einstein conceived his equations before data were available to verify them; when data became available, his calculations checked out exactly. Penrose goes on to consider the paradoxes of quantum mechanics, but readers without sophisticated mathematics are likely to find this section tough going. Finally, Penrose attempts to apply these issues to the question of whether the activities of mind can ever be duplicated by a computational device, a possibility he denies. His three critics then point to what they feel are weaknesses in his arguments, and finally Penrose counters their rebuttals. Penrose pushes the available analytical tools to the limit, and the result is far from light reading, but those willing to think hard about fundamental questions of mind and matter will find this discussion provocative and rewarding. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press; 1st edition (April 28, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0521785723
• ISBN-13: 978-0521785723
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.4 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #543,342 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

60 of 62 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Penrose: Science needs a "revolution"., March 12, 2003

By 

Wesley L. Janssen (San Diego, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Large, the Small and the Human Mind (Canto) (Paperback)

Let me first say something about Roger Penrose. One notices how certain other mathematicians and mathematical physicists speak of him. He is not only admired and respected; it seems that he is positively enjoyed! This may be a bit surprising when one notices that Penrose is something of a thorn in the side of several popular ideas in contemporary physics (and psychology). Cosmic inflation theories and ideas regarding the fundamental nature of quantum uncertainty find a formidable and articulate critic in the Oxford mathematician. Of the somewhat less popular, but ever fanciful "many-worlds" interpretation of quantum superpositioning, Penrose says "[the 'many-worlds' view] is not a very economical description of the Universe but I think things are rather worse than that for the many-worlds description. It is not just its lack of economy that worries me. The main problem is that it does not really solve the problem." He brings the same mental rapier to what he has called "the missing science" of mind and to the idea of computational / artificial intelligence. It is the problem of superpositioning described by Schrodinger and the decoherence caused by quantum measurement that prompt Penrose's search for an 'objective reduction' (OR) of quantum state vectors, the key ingredient in a "revolutionary" physical theory that remains a mystery. He speculates that this physical mystery may be related to the mystery of consciousness. He is unconvincing in this regard, but his ideas and arguments are quite interesting.
Well, let me now take this a bit further. Penrose also seems to terribly irk certain others! In particular he really raises the hackles of proponents of strong AI and the Dawkins/Dennett camp of 'consciousness-is-merely-mechanism' dogmatists. His views are much closer to those of perhaps most mathematicians and philosophers and stand on a deeper logical footing than do the doctrines that the human mind is mere biology. Let me say that I agree with Penrose in that the 'simple biology' view is never going to win this argument for reasons that can be demonstrated by the application of mathematical logic. To say that Penrose "doesn't understand biology" is to miss the point. The author freely admits, "there is a good deal of speculation in many of these ideas". Of course there is; science is largely -- we might even say wholly -- speculation. A more perceptive analysis would suggest that those committed to a rigid materialistic aesthetic don't understand (don't want to understand) the mathematics. Those who summarily dismiss Penrose do so unwisely. Given his contributions to mathematics (e.g., Penrose tiling, computability, mathematical logic) and his stature within the mathematics community, and given that the history of mathematics is essentially written by mathematicians, Roger Penrose may come to be considered the greatest mathematician of his generation. Given his work on black holes and space-time geometry (he recognizes the apparent "flatness" of the universe but suggests a more elegant geometry to describe that flatness), he may be one of his day's greatest physicists as well. Should his hunch ("OR") one day prove "true", his stature would approach that of a Newton or Einstein. The point being that any scientist who avoids or ignores Penrose's views, or is inclined to dismiss them by erroneously characterizing them, does so, as I say, unwisely.
Chapters 4, 5, and 6 are challenges to Penrose from A. Shimony, N. Cartwright, and S. Hawking, respectively. Apart from Shimony's discussion of A. N. Whitehead's views, its not on a par with the author's discourses; Cartwright suggests that nature may be a mess of "patchwork" laws (her view itself seems a horrible mess), and Hawking is disappointingly flippant. Penrose certainly meets these challenges.
I must say that the "controversy" over Penrose's Platonism is nothing less than nonsensical. Hawking complains "basically, he's a Platonist," as though calling him an offensive name and thereby granting the reader cause to disregard Penrose's arguments. That's unfortunate. Most of history's great minds have been Platonists; even Aristotle*, so often cited as the philosophical godfather of reductionism, was arguably a Platonist. Augustine, Kepler, Descartes, Pascal, Newton, Leibniz, Kant, Linnaeus, Einstein*, Schrödinger, Gödel, Whitehead -- the list of Platonists is long and impressive. As Penrose has said, "... it is my direct personal impression that the considerable majority of working mathematicians are at least 'weak' Platonists." Yet it seems as if some who call themselves "positivists" feel a calling to be science's mind-police. I suggest that this should be the real controversy... So-called positivists would do well to honesty consider Gödel's observation that the idea that mind/mentality is simply material is nothing more than the "prejudice of our time."
There is a rather child-like glee in the way Penrose sees and uses mathematics. His investigations and speculations are those of an extremely astute mind having fun! In his aggressive curiosity, his boldness, his clear-eyed honesty about the frailties of human thought and the limits of science, it seems to me that Penrose is something of a treasure and an inspiration. As he candidly states, "... the world-view that present-day physicists tend to present may well be grossly overstated as to its closeness to completion, or even to its correctness!" This volume presents a concise look at the Penrose ideas/arguments and even if nothing much ever comes of these arguments, they present a shining example of the kind of creative thinking that moves science into new frontiers.
*(footnote: While recognizing that it can easily be argued that Aristotle and Einstein were not "strong" Platonists, it seems obvious to me that they were each Platonists in some fundamental ways. I consider them to have been "weak" Platonists.)

46 of 52 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars For physicists, mathematicians or geniuses only, June 29, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: The Large, the Small and the Human Mind (Hardcover)

On the back of the book jacket it states that this book provides an "accessible" introduction to Roger Penrose's ideas. This is simply false, unless you are a physicist, a mathematician or a genius. For all others (in which category I fall), this book is close to incomprehensible. Roger Penrose is brilliant, has a wonderfully clear mind, and can write beautifully and clearly. I think that _The Emperor's New Mind_ and _Shadows of the Mind_ are wonderful books. Penrose can make extremely difficult ideas wonderfully clear, by breaking down complex arguments into clear simple steps. Some pages of Emperor's and Shadows take a long time to understand, (I must admit that I have read quite a bit less than all of either book), but the argument is spelled out so clearly that with effort and patience it can be fully understood. Penrose, I think, understands the questions he is wrestling with as well as any one alive, and his is a mind of great depth as well as clarity. Even if you don't find his arguments entirely convincing, you can't help but learn a great deal from these books, and develop insights of great value. What went wrong with _The Large, the Small and the Human Mind_? I think the key to answer lies in a comment Penrose makes on page 105, where he writes "The first 200 pages of _Shadows of the Mind_ were devoted to trying to show that there are no loop-holes in the argument that I am goind to give you." He then gives his argument in a few pages. The main part of the book (not including the replies of others and Penrose's replies to these replies) is just 139 rather small pages long. The book has many paragraphs like the following: "The first is the Geroch-Hartle scheme for quantum gravity, which turns out to have a non-computable element, because it invokes a result, due to Markov, which asserts that topological 4-manifolds are not computationally classifiable. I shall not go into this technical matter, but it does show that this feature of non-computability has already come up in a natural way in attempts to combine General Relativity and quantum mechanics." If, like me, you don't know what the Geroch-Hartle scheme is, and you don't know what topological4-manifolds are, you really won't know what to make of this paragraph. By "not going into this technical matter" Penrose is not omitting a minor technical detail of interest only to a select few, he is leaving readers like me completely baffled. Penrose tried to write a short book that would give a clear idea of his basic ideas, and I think he failed. I know that he can make complex ideas wonderfully clear when he takes the time. In this book he has shown that, at least on this occaision, he can not write a book that is both brief and clear. Here is another example, this time from Penrose's response to Abner Shimony's comments: (pages 176-7) "Abner mentions Mielnik's non-Hilbertian quantum mechanics....In ordinary quantum mechanics, the space of density matrices consitutes a convex set, and the 'pure states', which would have a single state vector description, occur on the boundary of this set. This picture arises from an ordinary Hilbert space, being a subset of the tensor product of the Hilbert space and its comples conjugate (i.e. dual)." Did you understand that? If so, you might learn a great deal from this book. There are a number of topics that I have read about previously in other books, for example, non locality, Schroedinger's cat, the EPR experiment. In almost every case, Penrose's presentation was the worst I have seen. Probably everything he says is quite correct, but the presentation is so compressed that it was usually almost impossible for me to follow. There are sections that I could follow, but even there he was so sketchy that I ended up with only a vague idea of _why_ he believes what he does, even when it was clear _what_ he believed. For instance, on pages 100-101 he is concerned with four approaches to awareness, which he labels A through D. "D" is as follows: Awareness cannot be explained by physical, computational, or any other scientific terms. Here is, in its entirety, what he has to say about "D": Finally, the is always viewpoint D, according to which it is a mistake to look at these issues in terms of science at all. Perhaps awareness cannot be explained in scientific terms. Penrose likes one of the other four positions, which is clearly stated, as is "D." But I would have liked to see Penrose develop in detail the reasons for his rejecting D. He does this only indirectly, by arguing for his preferred alternative, and this quite briefly. I think that I understood enough of the book to say that if Penrose turns out to be even roughly correct, he will be regarded as one of the great geniuses of the century. His proposals are bold, and deal with questions of the greatest interest. If only I could have followed his arguments! I hope that somebody who can follow his arguments posts a review.

20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The clearest statement of Penrose's philosophy to date., December 1, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: The Large, the Small and the Human Mind (Hardcover)

A previous commentator claimed that this book was not readable enough for a mass audience--I have to disagree with this view wholeheartedly. I would say that his previous works, especially "Shadows of the Minds" were difficult to digest due to the amount of mathematics contained in almost all of the chapters (this doesn't negate the power of his ideas--he just makes them hard to understand). This latest work presents all of his major ideas on cosmology, quantum physics, and the nature of the mind in an extremely clear manner. His treatment of quantum physics is the best I've seen to date in a popular work. A short and rewarding read.