Roger Penrose Quotes

Even when I was studying mathematics, physics, and computer science, it always seemed that the problem of consciousness was about the most interesting problem out there for science to come to grips with.

Studying consciousness tells us more about how the world is fundamentally strange. I think we have a few revolutions to go yet before we get to the bottom of it.

Lofty questions about the mind are fascinating to ask, philosophers have been asking them for three millennia both in India where I am from and here in the West - but it is only in the brain that we can eventually hope to find the answers.

I think that consciousness has always been the most important topic in the philosophy of mind, and one of the most important topics in cognitive science as a whole, but it had been surprisingly neglected in recent years.

I became really interested in the study of consciousness.

I don't doubt that the explanation for consciousness will arise from the mercilessly scientific account of psychology and neuroscience, but, still, isn't it neat that the universe is such that it gave rise to conscious beings like you and me?

If we had the fundamental laws of nature tomorrow, we still wouldn't understand consciousness. We wouldn't even understand turbulence.

Consciousness, there are about 20,000 papers on consciousness with no consensus. Nowhere in history have so many people devoted so much time to produce so little.

Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable.

There is an urgent need for a radical revision of our current concepts of the nature of consciousness and its relationship to matter and the brain.

Anyway, there is a lot of really interesting work going on in the neuroscience and psychology of consciousness, and I would love to see philosophers become more closely involved with this.

For me, consciousness is the most interesting unsolved problem of science, and, in fact, we may never know what it is about a particular arrangement of neurons that gives rise to consciousness. Our consciousness, like the air we breathe or like the passage of time, is central to our existence as intelligent beings.

There's certainly nothing original about the observation that conscious experience poses a hard problem.

Consciousness, rather than being something that we have, is something we participate in.

Modern science tells us that the conscious self arises from a purely physical brain. We do not have immaterial souls.

Without consciousness the mind-body problem would be much less interesting. With consciousness it seems hopeless.

I'm the guy who reputedly denies that people experience colors or pains, and thinks that thermostats think — just ask my critics.

An ultimate joint challenge for the biological and the computational sciences is the understanding of the mechanisms of the human brain, and its relationship with the human mind.

Eventually, I believe, current attempts to understand the mind by analogy with man-made computers that can perform superbly some of the same external tasks as conscious beings will be recognized as a gigantic waste of time.

Many philosophers say it's impossible to explain our conscious experience in scientific, biological terms at all. But that's not exactly true. Scientists have explained why we have certain experiences and not others. It's just that they haven't explained the special features of consciousness that philosophers care about.

I came to realise that Darwinian evolution had no explanation of me as an experiencing self.

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?

The widespread assumption is that somehow, the brain produces the mind; somehow millions of neurons fire signals at one another create or produce consciousness... but we have no idea how or why this happens. I'm afraid that in many cases, people in the tech world fail to understand that.

I've always had this fascination with the brain. I'm not really much of a religious person, but like anybody, you are at least fascinated by what some call a soul - what I would call the brain - and who we are and how we work.

I've always been fascinated by the body and the mind.