Roger Penrose Quotes

A computer is a great device because it enables you to do anything which is automatic, anything that you don't need your understanding for. Understanding is outside a computer. It doesn't understand.
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.
I have certainly enjoyed puzzles since an early age, and things that look like impossible things are often particularly intriguing.
I think I am intrigued by paradoxes. If something seems to be a paradox, it has something deeper, something worth exploring.
I used to make polyhedra with my father. There were no clear lines between games and toys for children and his professional work.
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.
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.
Might we... be doing something with our brains that cannot be described in computational terms at all? How do our feelings of conscious awareness - of happiness, pain, love, aesthetic sensibility, will, understanding, etc. - fit into such a computational picture?
My father came from a Quaker family. His father was a professional artist who did portraits - very traditional, a lot of religious subjects.
My father himself was a human geneticist who was recognized for demonstrating that older mothers tend to get more Down syndrome children, but he had lots of scientific interests.
My older brother is a distinguished theoretical physicist, a fellow of the Royal Society.
My younger brother ended up the British chess champion 10 times, a record.
Quantum entanglement is a very intriguing issue, but it is not impossible.
Science and fun cannot be separated.
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.
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.
Sometimes it's the detours which turn out to be the fruitful ideas.
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.
There is a certain sense in which I would say the universe has a purpose. It's not there by chance.
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.
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AuthorName
Roger Penrose
Profession
Physicist
BirthDate
08 August, 1931
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