The Emperor s New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds and the Laws of Physics (Popular Science)

£6.32

Very Worthwhile Reading. - Although I am currently making my way through Professor Penrose s book, a review of my impressions thus far is warranted. Essentially, my inexpert impression is that a legitimate Platonist view exists to the effect that man possesses a God given talent for understanding, beyond what is possible by algorithms alone (the latter being the fundamentalist view). This is hugely encouraging and Professor Penrose very ably supplies, in extraordinary detail, fascinating mathematical evidence--from Turing machines to complex numbers and through brilliant summaries of extremely complex academic papers--why this should be so. I look forward to finishing reading the (rather weighty) tome in good time, in the meantime, I would wish that our friend Dawkins would answer some of these fundamental questions, rather than do the usual round of soft BBC radio interviews and sermoninsing documentaries.

Great tour of physics, not sure about the metaphysics - I give this book five stars cos it occupies, along with Barrow and Tipler s The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (Oxford Paperbacks) a niche that nothing else quite does. It is on the furthest edge of popular science writing before you penetrate into the realm of the specialist. So for a person like me with undergraduate maths it gave me a lot of information without intolerable effort. It was tough going but very worthwhile. For anyone with less than A-level (I mean 70 s A-level) maths though, I d stick with the books with no equations, like the very popular A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes, which I rate more as a human interest story than as an introduction to any actual cosmology.As for Penrose s conjectures about the mental. Well, his ideas have been around for a while now and as far as I can tell have not led us to anything new. He exhibits the common fuzziness of the day, that is only really now getting tightened up on in the Philosophy of Mind literature, of conflating the problem of mentation, i.e. what goes on in the mind of a mathematician when she s having a great insight, with the problem of consciousness, i.e. what is it? They are both profound and mysterious problems but they are not the same problem, and not even necessarily related. I can still see a space for how quantum mechanical, i.e. truly random, processes might get exploited in pruning decision trees when searching a problem space, i.e. with respect the mentation problem. But how quantum randomness might contribute to consciousness seems more problematic. The most incisive contribution to the question of consciousness I m aware of right now is Edelman & Tononi s A Universe of Consciousness How Matter Becomes Imagination.But this book is great for the physics, and certainly at the limits of what someone of my educational background can indulge in as a spare time activity. Penrose s next book on this topic Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness was more mathematically rigorous and lost me pretty well straight away.

Skip this - The one redeeming feature this book had was its overview of theoretical physics. The chapters bookending the good bit were a complete nonsense. Penrose has now produced another, more in-depth and quite superb, version of his take on physics in The Road to Reality, thereby obviating the need for this title.

Stylistic difficulties mask an outstanding book - Penrose does not shrink from the difficult when trying to explain the problems he s obsessed about. This is one of the best books on the subject (the subject in question being What s it all about, really, when you come to think of it?), and I can t think of anyone else who s treading the same ground in the same way (Hawking s rather more specialised and abstruse, Greene centres mainly on the details of the physics and Hofstadter s more into the logic and philosophy).However, I have difficulty with Penrose s style, and find he can be a bit difficult to follow sometimes. Having said that, it s no easy task to put all these concepts into plain prose. I know I couldn t do it.

Entertaining and Mathematically Advanced - I found this book stimulating and entertaining in equal measure. It looks at the questions such as -- if we had enough information, we could predict absolutely everything, or not? Is the human mind simply a machine (for example a computer)? Can we actually be transported Star-trek style or not? Are we (including our memories) just a collection of atoms that could be reconstituted?In answering these questions Penrose embarks on a tour of the mathematical concepts and theories that underpin our understanding of the Universe.There seems to be much more maths than is really needed, and there is a lot of theory (The book runs to over 500 pages after all). You will also need advanced A level maths to cope (on the basis that I just coped, and that s the level of maths I reached).Entertaining and enjoyable IF you are interested in Maths. If you are not, stay away.

• The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe
• Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness
• Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (20th anniversary edition with a new preface by the author)
• Six Not-so-easy Pieces: Einstein s Relativity, Symmetry and Space-time (Penguin Press Science)
• The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time and the Texture of Reality (Penguin Press Science)