The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of… (1989)

Interesting and insightful. Unfortunately author dives into details (well maybe that's overstatement, but how do you call 50 to 200(?) pages digressions) of every concept he introduces, totally destroying the flow. It took me a while to finish it, but by the time I was done, I couldn't remember half of the arguments/hypothesises/threads. ( )

NA

It's infuriating. The author keeps obliquely referring to his views which are apparently widely known but I don't know them, especially now, decades later. You want to talk about them? How about you include them in your book?

Funny to read high school physics presented as cutting age science. That's a positive thing, successful cutting age science today accepted as boring fact by high schoolers tomorrow. That's got nothing to do with arguments which the authors is trying to make and which I'm still trying to fathom because they are so obvious apparently they don't need stating. ( )

Fascinating, accessible book, about maths, science and conciousness. Give it plenty of time. It's a slow read. He gives a good explanation of many physical and mathematical concepts, including for example, non-computability, entropy. He explains that the singularity of the big bang is different in nature to the singularity of the big crunch (if it happens), and that a new theory of quantum gravity should account for this. I like his discussion of quantum mechanics and the idea that the wave function collapses once the interference energy exceeds approximately one graviton. This seems a more workable idea than the Many-Worlds approach. This is definitely the best work I have read so far regarding consciousness, but it is also clearly quite dated now. This edition was published in 2016, but it was first published in 1989. The discussion misses the more recent approaches of deep neural networks and also improved understanding of the mind eg Daniel Khaneman's work and the idea of "the rider and the elephant" and the "reporting" function of our consciousness. Hopefully a good launch pad for his more recent books. ( )

Cierto, los ordenadores pueden resolver la mayoría de las tareas "mentales" con mucha mayor eficiencia y rapidez, y en infinita cantidad superior a lo que lo hace un cerebro humano. Pero... ¿dónde está la diferencia? No es tarea fácil explicárselo al profano. El cosmólogo Roger Penrose, el mayor especialista del mundo en la teoría de la relatividad, se pasa todo este grueso volumen haciéndolo, y para ello ha de acudir no sólo a la descripción de la estructura del cerebro, sino también a teoremas como los de Gödel, recurrir a la máquina de Turing, los agujeros negros y los blancos, la radiación de Hawking, la entropía o la mecánica cuántica. Con ello explica por qué hay aspectos del pensamiento humano que jamás podrán ser emulados por un ordenador. ( )