Roger Penrose

British mathematical physicist, Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford, and the most prominent scientific critic of the idea that minds are computers. Known for Penrose tilings, twistor theory and work with Stephen Hawking on spacetime singularities, he shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics for showing that, in Einstein's theory, black holes form under very general conditions. In 'The Emperor's New Mind' (1989) and 'Shadows of the Mind' (1994) he extended an argument of the philosopher J. R. Lucas: since, by Gödel's incompleteness theorems, a consistent formal system cannot prove its own Gödel sentence, while mathematicians can see that such sentences are true, human mathematical understanding cannot be algorithmic (see Lucas–Penrose argumentLucas–Penrose argument, n.: An argument that human minds cannot be computers because, using a famous result in logic, people can see that certain statements are true that no fixed computer program could prove.). With the anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff he proposed that consciousness arises from quantum processes in neurons' microtubules. Most logicians and AI researchers reject both proposals, but they remain reference points in debates over strong AIstrong AI, n.: Originally, the claim that a computer running the right program would literally have a mind and understand, not just imitate understanding. Today it often simply means AI as capable as humans across the board. and machine consciousnessmachine consciousness, n.: Whether a machine such as an AI system could have genuine experiences of its own — and the research field that tries to find out, or to build such a machine..