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47 of 51 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Emperor's New Mind., December 18, 2003
Roger Penrose, "one of the world's most knowledgeable and creative mathematical physicists," presents in his 1989 Emperor's New Mind one of the most intriguing and substantive popularizations of mathematical logic and physical theory that has ever been published. As a reader of many books written by scientists, I will say that few compare with this one. Penrose wrestles with what he sees as some of science's most inadequate or poorly developed (although popularly accepted) ideas. As certain physical theories are found wanting, his grapplings extend to some of the deepest questions of metaphysics. Of the deepest questions, Penrose says, "To ask for definitive answers to such grandiose questions would, of course, be a tall order. Such answers I cannot provide; nor can anyone else, though some may try to impress us with their guesses." While he speaks respectfully of individuals with whom he has certain differences of opinion, the "some" in that statement might be taken to be Hawking, Dawkins, Dennett, to suggest a few. The author here tends toward a more humble and questioning approach. Penrose's puzzlings are complex, creative, and speculative, and even his admirers might easily misrepresent certain of his opinions and conjectures. A case in point may be the fact that he finds cosmic inflation theories to have less explanatory power than others claim for them -- this doesn't mean he necessarily rejects inflation, rather he doubts claims that inflation significantly helps explain the specialness of the early universe. Positivists may be disposed to discount the problem but there appears to be good reason for Penrose's skepticism. However this is not treated in this volume.
Rigorously building a case against the fundamental arguments for strong AI, Penrose begins with what for him is to ultimately be 'le coup de grâce', considerations and arguments from mathematical logic. If the human mind works non-algorithmically, then we know of no way to digitize/program its processes. The mind does in fact function non-algorithmically, a fact demonstrated without much difficulty. It learns in intuitive, non-linear, and mysteriously creative ways. The idea that some non-algorithmic approach might achieve a program equivalent to the human mind is not supported by any "useful" (or better, see below) physical theory and is not mathematically tenable. Strong AI is thus relegated to a mere ideological preference (and obviously to sci-fi). In his mathematical considerations, Penrose is most interested in the work of Turing and Gödel and in the Platonic essence of mathematics itself. Concluding that the human mind cannot be reduced to an algorithm (or any set of algorithms), Penrose next questions whether the mind might be reducible physically. Here he finds the questions and answers less well defined than he has in mathematics. His tour of classical and quantum physics features interpretations and ideas that many readers may have not encountered (which makes the text fun). The problem of "correct quantum gravity" (that is, the incompleteness [or incorrectness?] of relativity and quantum theories) is one that Penrose and other theoreticians have struggled with for decades. Penrose wonders if this mysterious and conspicuously missing physical theory might be related to the also conspicuously missing science of mind. This speculation on his part is the theme also of his more recent books. As Erwin Schrödinger (like Einstein and Gödel, Platonists all) seems to be one whose ideas are of particular interest to Penrose, I will cite Schrödinger's view: "Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else." But Penrose doesn't quite argue this view, although it would seem an obvious conclusion from his best arguments. Here is a classic example of how we may know 'something' without knowing everything: we can know that the human mind cannot be reduced to an algorithm -- or algorithm of algorithms -- and yet it is not known whether we can even know precisely what mind is. Particularly so if, as Schrödinger says, mind is irreducible.
The chapter on cosmology is excellent, as one might expect of a Roger Penrose. The consideration of the "specialness" of the initial [cosmological] conditions and of the relationship of this specialness to the second law of thermodynamics is also fascinating as it is precisely the second law that lends the "arrow of time" its apparent non-symmetrical aspect -- in other words, defines physical reality as we experience it. In this sense, the second law connects the human mind to the cosmos (which is interesting but does nothing to help us "reduce" mind).
Penrose suggests, and I cannot find any reason to disagree, that all scientific theories can be assigned to one of three broad categories, which he calls: (1.) SUPERB, (2.) USEFUL, (3.) TENTATIVE. All SUPERB theories (there are roughly a dozen) stand within the purvey of physics, and: "It is remarkable that all the SUPERB theories of Nature have proved to be extraordinarily fertile as sources of mathematical ideas. There is a deep and beautiful mystery in this fact: that these superbly accurate theories are also extraordinarily fruitful simply as mathematics. No doubt this is telling us something profound about the connections between the real world of our physical experiences and the Platonic world of mathematics." Over time, theories (particularly those that do not feature such mathematical beauty or fertility) may tend to move between the categories. Theories held to be SUPERB for centuries have dropped completely from the current categories; theories have faded and re-emerged. . . "we should not be too complacent that the pictures that we have formed at any one time are not to be overturned by some later and deeper view."
Some readers will not like the fact that, after extensive rumination on very difficult and deep questions (like "what is mind?"), the author doesn't conclude with a pretense that he, or anyone else, has definitive answers. This reader appreciated the integrity of Penrose's questionings and of his conclusions (or lack of conclusions). I will misappropriate one of Penrose's terms -- as a text examining mathematics, physics, and the human mind, this volume is SUPERB.
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29 of 34 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Don't be fooled by kitsch materialists, March 23, 2000
By A Customer
First, what this book is not: It is not "creation science"...it doesn't address evolution...or the existence of God...or existence of the human soul. In other words, it is NOT special pleading against modern science by someone with a religious agenda. What it IS rather, is a solid study of cognition, theories of artificial intelligence, and the enduring problem of the nature of human consciousness by one of the world's top physicists (a professed materialist by the way, not a religious believer), who together with Stephen Hawking developed the astrophysics of "black holes" in the '60's. What Penrose suggests here (a theory he expands on in his subsequent "Shadows of the Mind"), is that science, and specifically physics, is inadequate now, and more importantly will always be inadequate, to describe the nature of human intelligence, cognition, and consciousness--a thesis similar to the showing of Godel's 1931 Theorem that certain fundamental axioms of mathematics were incapable of proof within any mathematical system. In other words, Penrose suggests that there are elemental restrictions within science itself limiting our understanding of our own mental processes, which concomitantly limit the possibilities for development of artificial intelligence. And that obviously doesn't sit well with those for whom naturalistic science is itself a kind of "religion," as some of the dismissive reviews on this page show. My advice: just ignore them and read this book, and well as its successor, "Shadows of the Mind." It's a challenging read and not for intellectual lightweights, but it will richly reward those with the patience to make it through.
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43 of 56 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Magnificent - Changed my life, October 13, 2005
About 10 years ago I was a physicist with no interest in philosophy when I idly picked up a copy of this book on special offer. As I read I was drawn into the fascinating world of Penrose, where he explains with beautiful clarity some of the physics/maths I knew well already and some that was new to me like Godel. The latter he explained very well graphically, with the diagonal cut. This graphical approach is his strength - it is also used to good effect in his most recent book, "The Road to Reality". But where he really scored in TENM was in opening my eyes to the world of philosophy on the mind/body debate. His references to Searle and others were pointers I followed up to good effect until I was thoroughly engrossed in that debate. Thus the book was very effective. His insights on mathematical inspiration were also good, as was the way Deep Blue failed miserably on an obvious chess problem because its brute force method lacks the ' qualia ' or feeling of meaning and true understanding.Thus with Godel he had a good math reason for doubting that Computers could solve all the problems we grasp intuitively and with examples of this intuition he gives good ' intuitive' reasons. I suspect that for many other physicists this book was also an eye-opener. So the 5 stars are richly deserved. Having said that, and with the hindsight of later reading on the philosophy of consciousness, what was not emphasised enough in the book was a discusion of the ineffable nature of subjective consciousness. E.g. the idea of 'qualia' or subjective experience of red or music etc. is a theme that is the basis for the 'hard problem' of consciousness in philosophy, a term coined by David Chalmers. This 'hard problem' or ' explanatory gap ' is another powerful argument against AI and a reason to doubt that purely objective processes can explain how the ' wine of subjective experience arises from the water of objective processes '. Thus the book would have been more complete with such a discussion, as it takes a bit of lateral thinking to grasp this, and most scientists are blissfully ignorant of this funda-mental feature of reality. However, his discussion of mathematical insight is indirectly concerned with one of the 'non-sensory qualia' and thus touches on the problem of the subjective/objective dichotomy.
Yes, maybe there are hordes of scientists or others swamped by the default world-view of reductionism but who feel uneasy at the idea that we are just computers made of meat. For them this could be the opening to the counter-arguments that will enable them to escape the blanket coverage given in the media to dismal, depressive wofflers like Daniel Dennett and Dawkins. When I see the number of reviews here who start with adulation of Dennett then I realise that we need more high profile standard bearers for the anti-AI position. It seems most people have read no further than the nihilist drivel of Dennett and his ilk. When I recall his 'Darwin's dangerous idea' and its revolting comparison of darwinism to an acid eating through anything which he contemptuously dismissed as 'sky-hooks' etc. then I long for my Penrose or Colin McGinn or David Chalmers or even John Searle - though the latter's insistence on emergence of consciousness from brain as digestion from stomach is a bit hard to stomach. I noticed also in one or two of the reviews below this muddled confusion of Darwinism and consciousness - again one sees the mark of the Dawkins/Dennett brigade there. Darwinian theories of natural selection have little to do with conscious processes. Maybe Dennett's multple drafts theory has an element of that, but the fact that he uses this as a weapon toward eliminativism is unjustified. Most of the popular science readers who lap up Dennett fail to realise that he's one of a dying breed of behaviourists who effectively censored any mention of consciousness for almost a century. Thus we are only now picking up where William James left off - his writings are again extraordinarily relevant and modern. Thus the title Emperor's New Mind can also refer to this tragic lost century of ultra-materialism and negative positivism. The scales have fallen from many people's eyes now, as they join the cognitive revoluion in consciosness studies - Dennett and other neo-behaviourists are indeed dinosaurs in the age of the Tucson conferences with their exciting discussions on C - but since those are pluralist gatherings the whole spectrum of thought is represented, from Dennet to Penrose to Chalmers...
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