Roger Penrose - What is Consciousness?

Roger what is it about Consciousness that attracted you as a mathematical physicist to go into an area that you hadn't been in before well I think my interest in this area came way before that I my father had a big interest in these issues and uh he became uh interested professionally he was interested in the inheritance of mental disease uh but we used to have discussions about whether Consciousness could be computational activity we it was the kind of thing that people were getting interested in in fact secretly at one stage of my life I was secretly wanting to be a brain surgeon so i' open the brains up and see what how it worked which never quite worked out but uh it was really later when uh still thinking that maybe we were all computers or something uh I had an interest in in girdle's theorem this is when I was an undergraduate in mathematics in London London University and I went went to Cambridge then as a graduate student and there I went to courses on various things which found interesting like

bondi's course on cosmology and derx course on quantum mechanics and another course which was given by a lecture by the name of Steen who talked about girdles theorem and teering machines and all this and I think it was at that stage that I formed my view that there has to be something going on when we understand things particularly mathematics which is the what it was about uh which can cannot be done by computers the the understanding of what you're doing is something different from computation uh I had no idea what it might be but from D's lectures I sort of picked up this Paradox between the measurement process and the uh rules of quantum mechanics what was the core element of Consciousness that that made you reject the computational theory I think it was the girdle argument and from steen's lectures it made it completely clear and things he put it in a way which is not the way often people do it people usually at least in popular account say oh well girdle's theorem shows there are

things in mathematics you can't prove see unprovable statements and I didn't like the idea of that but Steen made it completely clear that well provable by what means you see now do you trust the means of proof if you trust the means of proof then you can transcend them now what's going on there you see it means our understanding enables us to go beyond the any rules of proof that you that you trust so uh I think I formulated my ideas then that what we do when we consciously understand something is not computational but that was really a result of of of the lectures and mathematical logic I went to so that's the fundamental point that that Consciousness is not computational so then you have to give another explan I think there's where dra's lectures came in that I felt you needed somewhere where there was a gap in our understanding now I don't know how long it took me to formulate this belief I think it gradually came over many years and I didn't think much of it I just formed a view that uh what what's

involved in conscious thinking can't be entirely described by the physics that we know and where is the big main Gap in the physics we know well it's in the quantum mechanical uh the sort of contradiction between the continuous Evolution it's given by the Schrodinger equation and the discret uh probabilistic thing which happens when you make a measurement the two things fit nicely together but they're inconsistent with each other yeah and the uh the argument against that is that you have two Mysteries and you try to solve two Mysteries like a simultaneous equation and Magic it works well I know people accuse me well one Mystery One mystery why don't they it's not that you see no it's clearly logical uh whether it's you know taking the logic too far I don't know it's it's it's that there has to be something outside the physic and it has to be something which is important to something of the operation Avail lots of things we don't know you know we don't know even now whether the universe is

spatially open or closed what's that got to do with it we don't know rules are that Define the masses of particles individually there's lots of mysteries there that's not directly relevant right but something the only thing which could be directly relevant is this big gap in our understanding which has to do with the two procedures of quantum mechanics which are inconsistent with each other so it needs some other Theory to fill that Gap and that is the one place that I could think of and I still the only only place I can think of where they've got a big enough gap which could be filled by some new theory in which computation doesn't rule you see everything else we know you can at least as closely as you like simulate in a computation yes what the physical world is doing according to those that physical Theory right but the one place we we don't know that is in this state reduction the big the big missing thing in quantum mechanics and how how does then that relate to the phenomenology what we feel like when

we're conscious well it doesn't not really I mean it does in the sense that you see there are many aspects to Consciousness which it doesn't touch you see happiness uh you know pain uh appreciation of beauty well it does to some degree but you none of these things are pretty are very direct but the one thing that it does touch is the understanding the quality of understanding something now that quality seems to me according to the girdle arguments and so on that quality isn't a computational process you understand you stand back you you understand what's going on and what does that mean I don't know but whatever it means it is something which requires your awareness it just doesn't make sense to me to say of an entity that it understands something if it's not even aware of it just the use of use of words implies that that involves awareness now that's one tiny little ingredient of what awareness is of what Consciousness is nevertheless it's enough in my view to make a start it doesn't answer all

the other questions you know what's involved when you perceive the color red or something like that uh certainly those things are not addressed by this but at least if you can find one thing and that's this one thing which is understanding and in this very limited area of understanding mathematics only because that's when you can make arguments there are lots of things understanding applies and you can't make uh rigorous arguments about it but here is one where you can make rigorous arguments and those rigorous arguments it seems to me pretty clearly uh tell us that our understanding is not a computational process