The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds and the Laws of Physics [Paperback]

Or something along these lines. I believe that his conceptual analysis of the issues is naïve and confused and that it is so because of a fatal attempt to present his work using mainly scientific terms (lots of which are redundant and irrelevant).

How intelligent is Artificial Intelligence, therefore, and, if it is intelligent, why should we qualify that intelligence as artificial?

The central eight chapters of the book are a grand tour of some of the accepted notions of mathematical logic, complex numbers and fractals, computability, classical physics, quantum mechanics and relativity, and, finally, the physiology of the brain. We are finally returned to the main question at the end of the book supposedly informed and invigorated (or enervated!) by this immersion into a cold bath of scientific dogma having, it is implied, thereby acquired the wherewithal to solve - with the author - the problems which have been posed at the book's beginning.

I suspect that the central (and, I believe, pseudo-) question which tantalises Penrose and which has tantalised so many scientifically-minded thinkers is this: given that humans can build machines of progressive and, indeed, seemingly unlimited complexity, able to perform more and more functions hitherto only performed by humans - as, for example, the ability to play chess, how is it that at no stage of this endeavour to equal nature's complexity can we expect that the machine will become self-aware?

I believe that this is possibly a psychological not a logically robust question because, firstly, there are no limits in principle to technological advance, even to that ultimate stage when humans - armed with all of nature's secrets, including knowledge of quantum mechanics, and with unlimited power - could replicate human or human-like entities. Nature does it; it is therefore possible; why should not we be able to do the same?

Secondly, we would have the same difficulties in deciding if a machine is self-aware as we have in deciding whether animals - or, indeed, other humans are aware. This is the old notion of solipsism made fashionable for use with computers.

Minds are modes of existing, not incidental human possessions that can be placed under the microscope.

The approach of many scientists, writing books like The Emperor's New Mind which explain or popularise science or, especially, attempt to apply philosophical concepts, is to use words that are used in scientific culture (which is what all science is), such as atom, *field, *time, differential equation, and so on, as primary. That is, to take them out of a cultural context and use them as if there were no context and, indeed, as if the cultural context could be deduced from them alone and as if they may not be mixed with words from other traditions. (Interestingly, is not this what religions do?) This is why the tour of the scientific disciplines in ENM is undertaken - to burn off the semantic and procedural underpinnings of these terms and to use them in isolation to attempt to 'solve' what I believe is a collection of pseudo-problems using what are now abstract and mis-applied ideas. (These notions do - I should stress - have their place and truth in technology and operational and mathematical science.)
It is interesting that by so-doing quantum scientists are now wrestling with the difficulty - and necessity - of re-introducing the observer!

For the reasons given above I have great difficulties reading books like ENM on their own terms. One has to disregard large amounts of the surface discussion to substitute a personal interpretation of what is, in fact, happening. I finish with a quote from p.293: 'Is the presence of a conscious being necessary for a 'measurement' actually to take place? I think that only a small minority of quantum physicists would affirm such a view'