Roger Penrose

When I was in Cambridge reading mathematics, I went to Amsterdam for the International Mathematics Congress. There I saw M.C. Escher's fascinating work. That inspired me to try my hand at drawing such impossibilities.

Some people take the view that the universe is simply there, and it runs along - it's a bit as though it just sort of computes, and we happen by accident to find ourselves in this thing. I don't think that's a very fruitful or helpful way of looking at the universe.

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

Some years ago, I wrote a book called the Emperor’s New Mind and that book was describing a point of view I had about consciousness and why it was not something that comes about from complicated calculations.

I believe there is something going on in a conscious being, which includes many animals, as well as ourselves, that is not a computational activity. And to be conscious at all is not a quality that a computer as such will ever possess - no matter how complicated, no matter how well it plays chess or any of these things.

Some people take the view that we happen by accident. I think that there is something much deeper, of which we have very little inkling at the moment.

The image of Stephen Hawking - who has died aged 76 - in his motorised wheelchair, with head contorted slightly to one side and hands crossed over to work the controls, caught the public imagination as a true symbol of the triumph of mind over matter.

My own way of thinking is to ponder long and I hope deeply on problems and for a long time which I keep away for years and years and I never really let them go.

And these little things may not seem like much but after a while they take you off on a direction where you may be a long way off from what other people have been thinking about.

If you come from mathematics, as I do, you realize that there are many problems, even classical problems, which cannot be solved by computation alone.

A computational device is incapable of developing a mind. We got consciousness not just by being clever.

If the computer-guided robots turn out to be our superiors in every respect, then will they not find that they can run the world better without the need of us at all? Humanity itself will then have become obsolete.

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.

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

We have a closed circle of consistency here: the laws of physics produce complex systems, and these complex systems lead to consciousness, which then produces mathematics, which can then encode in a succinct and inspiring way the very underlying laws of physics that gave rise to it.

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