PERSON
Roger Penrose
The physicist and mathematician who argued, from the foundations of logic to the physics of quantum gravity, that human consciousness involves non-computable processes that no digital machine can replicate—and that the “yet” qualifying every claim about AI’s current limitations may be not a forecast but a category error.
Roger Penrose arrived at the question of artificial intelligence not through computer science but through mathematics—specifically through the proof that
Kurt Gödel published in 1931, the most consequential result in the history of mathematical logic. In
The Emperor’s New Mind (1989) and
Shadows of the Mind (1994), Penrose argued that the human mathematician who perceives the truth of a Gödelian sentence is doing something that no formal system—and therefore no Turing machine, and therefore no digital computer—can do: she
sees the sentence is true through an act of understanding that transcends the formal system within which the sentence is expressed. If this act is genuine, then human mathematical cognition involves non-computable processes, and there exist capacities of consciousness that no computer program can replicate regardless of its power. To give this claim a physical basis, Penrose collaborated with anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff to propose
Orchestrated Objective Reduction—the theory