Emperor's New Mind

What Hacker News says

1. omnicognateOct 2025
   If you genuinely want the strongest statement of it, read The Emperor's New Mind followed by Shadows of the Mind, both by Roger Penrose.

   These books often get shallowly dismissed in terms that imply he made some elementary error in his reasoning, but that's not the case. The dispute is more about the assumptions on which his argument rests, which go beyond mathematical axioms and include statements about the nature of human perception of mathematical truth. That makes it a philosophical debate more than a mathematical one.

   Personally, I strongly agree with the non-mathematical assumptions he makes, and am therefore persuaded by his argument. It leads to a very different way of thinking about many aspects of maths, physics and computing than the one I acquired by default from my schooling. It's a perspective that I've become increasingly convinced by over the 30+ years since I first read his books, and one that I think acquires greater urgency as computing becomes an ever larger part of our lives.

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2. omnicognateOct 2025
   That's too brief to capture it, and I'm not going to try to summarise(*). The books are well worth a read regardless of whether you agree with Penrose. (The Emperor's New Mind is a lovely, wide-ranging book on many topics, but Shadows of the Mind is only worth it if you want to go into extreme detail on the AI argument and its counterarguments.)

   * I will mention though that "some" should be "all" in 2, but that doesn't make it a correct statement of the argument.

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3. antiterraOct 2025
   I read Roger Penrose's The Emperor's New Mind when I was younger. It suggested quantum processes as a last ditch effort for a non-deterministic brain. At the time, I thought it was a fascinating prediction of how our minds might work and that reading it made me a smarter person.

   I have since come to view it more as an interesting lesson in the pitfalls of hypothesis formation, popular non-fiction, and vanity.

   Even so, as a layperson, it's entirely understandable to perk up whenever someone discovers 'tubules' in the brain, even if none of that sufficiently supports any of the collapse requirements of the Penrose/Hammeroff quantum microtubes.

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4. gattrJun 2025
   It's also in his previous book "The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds and The Laws of Physics", along with a lot more. Strongly recommended (even though after reading a lot of Greg Egan, my views on consciousness somewhat shifted towards "classical computation can do it, too".)
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5. kreetxFeb 2025
   It's the definition of "exists" that is contested. To me, the infinity of anything is a generator (a program that continues to print digits). Does some infinite number exists "now"? Not really (it's being printed). But is the number being printed larger than any given integer? Yes. So, does infinity exists? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

   "The Emperor's New Mind" is a great book on this and related topics.

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6. michelppNov 2024
   My twice reading list:

     - Godel, Escher, Bach - Hoffstadter
     - The Soul of a New Machine - Kidder
     - The Emperor's New Mind - Penrose
     - The Connection Machine - Hillis
     - Algorithmics - Harel

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