This is "no indication of any sort of intelligence, let alone consciousness". Arthur C Clarke placed HAL, his thinking, feeling, ultimately paranoid computer, in 2001, during which year real AI researchers were teaching small robots to find their way around rooms! As Penrose says, It cannot be denied that early proponents of AI grotesquely underestimated the difficulty of their task. However, Penrose's opinions are given some force by the slow progress of work on AI. After all, what he is saying is that the goal of an intelligent, let alone conscious, computer is unattainable right from the start, a view understandably unpopular with those who are dedicating their lives to creating such entities. Penrose's ideas on consciousness are, to say the least, controversial in the AI community. So if the experiments I'm trying to get colleagues to perform show that I'm wrong then my model of consciousness will also be disproved." "The more detailed ideas I have about consciousness do depend on specifics - I must be right, not only in that quantum mechanics has its limits, but also in the detailed way in which it must be changed. This is interesting, quite apart from its implications for consciousness and AI. The level at which this will happen is around the limits of what is measurable with present-day technology. According to me, quantum mechanics, as we understand it today, has certain limitations and will be shown not to be correct. These other people don't, on the whole, think that you have to go that further step, and modify quantum He says that this is "what distinguishes my view from the others who believe that quantum mechanics are important in mental phenomena, although even that's a minority view. Penrose is unusual in believing that quantum mechanics will have to change in order to fit into such a unified theory. Roger Penrose giving a lecture at the conference These two beautiful theories both have much experimental evidence to support them, but unfortunately are This theory would reconcile quantum mechanics, which operates at very small scales, and relativity, which operates at very large scales. These ideasĪre set out very fully in Penrose's two bestselling works of popular science, "The Emperor's New Mind" and "Shadows of the Mind", the latter reviewed in this issue of Plus.Īt the moment, the central project of mathematical physics is the search for a so-called "Grand Unified Theory" or "Theory of Everything". This non-algorithmic element to human thought is, Penrose claims, due to quantum effects in the brain, which are the source of our feelings of self-awareness, our consciousness, and our capacity for leaps of inspiration. Anything a computer can do must be algorithmic, since computers can only do what they are programmed to do, and programs are algorithmic in nature. All that is necessary is toįollow the steps. Roughly speaking, an algorithm is a clearly defined set of steps for carrying out some procedure once an algorithm for carrying out a procedure has been found, no more independent thought is required. Perhaps Penrose is best known to the wider public for his view that there is an essentially non-algorithmic element to human thought and human consciousness. © 2002 Cordon Art - Baarn - Holland (All rights reserved.
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