![]() ![]() “The most likely place, if we’re not going to go outside physics altogether, is in this big unknown-namely, making sense of quantum mechanics.” “We need a major revolution in our understanding of the physical world in order to accommodate consciousness,” Penrose told me in a recent interview. He starts with the premise that consciousness is not computational, and it’s beyond anything that neuroscience, biology, or physics can now explain. Penrose’s theory promises a deeper level of explanation. Others-often branded “mysterians”-claim that subjective experience is simply beyond the capacity of science to explain.Ĭonventional wisdom goes something like this: The theory is almost certainly wrong, but Penrose is brilliant. The philosopher David Chalmers has speculated that consciousness may be a fundamental property of nature existing outside the known laws of physics. Something seems to be missing in current theories of consciousness. ![]() ![]() Even if the human brain’s neurons, synapses and neurotransmitters could be completely mapped-which would be one of the great triumphs in the history of science-it’s not clear that we’d be any closer to explaining how this 3-pound mass of wet tissue generates the immaterial world of our thoughts and feelings. And for all the recent advances in neurobiology, we seem no closer to solving the mind-brain problem than we were a century ago. Artificial intelligence experts have been predicting some sort of computer brain for decades, with little to show so far. Still, it’s not hard to see why Penrose’s theory has gained attention. Most scientists regard quantum mechanics as irrelevant to our understanding of how the brain works. But his theory of consciousness pushes the edges of what’s considered plausible science and has left critics wondering why he embraces a theory based on so little evidence. Penrose doesn’t seem to mind being branded a maverick, though he disputes the label in regard to his work in physics. ![]() Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. His discovery of certain geometric forms known as “Penrose tiles”-an ingenious design of non-repeating patterns-led to new directions of study in mathematics and crystallography. He also invented “twistor theory,” a new way to connect quantum mechanics with the structure of spacetime. Penrose, 85, is a mathematical physicist who made his name decades ago with groundbreaking work in general relativity and then, working with Stephen Hawking, helped conceptualize black holes and gravitational singularities, a point of infinite density out of which the universe may have formed. No one quite knows what to make of this theory, developed with the American anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff, but conventional wisdom goes something like this: Their theory is almost certainly wrong, but since Penrose is so brilliant (“One of the very few people I’ve met in my life who, without reservation, I call a genius,” physicist Lee Smolin has said), we’d be foolish to dismiss their theory out of hand. He believes we must go beyond neuroscience and into the mysterious world of quantum mechanics to explain our rich mental life. Once you start poking around in the muck of consciousness studies, you will soon encounter the specter of Sir Roger Penrose, the renowned Oxford physicist with an audacious-and quite possibly crackpot-theory about the quantum origins of consciousness. ![]()
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