The Emperor's New Mind

Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics

By: Roger Penrose

Narrated by: Julian Elfer

For decades, proponents of artificial intelligence have argued that computers will soon be doing everything that a human mind can do. Admittedly, computers now play chess at the grandmaster level, but do they understand the game as we do? Can a computer eventually do everything a human mind can do?

In this absorbing and frequently contentious book, Roger Penrose puts forward his view that there are some facets of human thinking that can never be emulated by a machine. The book's central concern is what philosophers call the "mind-body problem". Penrose examines what physics and mathematics can tell us about how the mind works, what they can't, and what we need to know to understand the physical processes of consciousness. He is among a growing number of physicists who think Einstein wasn't being stubborn when he said his "little finger" told him that quantum mechanics is incomplete, and he concludes that laws even deeper than quantum mechanics are essential for the operation of a mind. To support this contention, Penrose takes the listener on a dazzling tour that covers such topics as complex numbers, Turing machines, complexity theory, quantum mechanics, formal systems, Godel undecidability, phase spaces, Hilbert spaces, black holes, white holes, Hawking radiation, entropy, quasicrystals, and the structure of the brain.

©1989 Oxford University Press; Preface copyright 1999, 2016 by Roger Penrose (P)2019 Tantor

This is great news. Good Job Nobel Prize Winner!

It would appear that Nassim Haramein with Walter Russell's work compounded and the fact that Walter has just received the Nobel Prize. I am exited to read Nassims new paper he is about to release on the compounding effects with the Iching and the ability of the biorhythms of humanity....

Not appropriate for an audio format.

This book is filled with illustrations and equations. The illustrations are of course just skipped over but so are sections of text that refer to the illustrations. This means that sometimes the audio will be describing some concept and will suddenly skip to another concept abruptly. The audio tries to read the equations but, not being simple equation and using Greek letters and symbols more common to advanced physics, the equations often turn into a garbled mess. I ended up getting a hard copy of the book in order to follow what was going on.

Excellent book, terrible adaption to audio book

This is one of the most profoundly interesting text in existence. Few people in the world are able to raise and investigate this intellectual territory, with the credibility of Roger Penrose. However, he himself expresses (in this book!) how hard he finds it to achieve an understanding of mathematical ideas through verbal communication. Ironic then, the editors of this book decided to read every single equation. This is incomprehensible and quickly becomes irritating.

Suggest future editors consider supplying an accompanying PDF download for the equations, diagrams and illustrations as they are an essential part of the content necessary to understand the author’s ideas.

fascinating

great narrator, interesting ideas. the math was over my head and the long part where all the binary numbers are read out was rough to listen to but the rest was really interesting and thought provoking especially now that AI is in the news constantly

Echoing others: get the book in paper.

Put shortly, please buy the book. It is important material heading into the 21st century. AI, philosophy, and consciousness studies from the lens of science is a huge portion of the future. Roger Penrose has done a phenomenal and thorough overview starting from scratch. He builds his ideas fluently and expertly, but reading it aloud simply did not work. I had read the reviews and tried my hardest to make it through the audio. It's not a poor performance, but what tossed me over the tolerant cliff was the reading of the syntax.

I can't help but wonder why a mathematician didn't read a mathematician's book.
f(x) should be read "f OF x" and NOT "f open parenthesis x close parenthesis" This became ridiculously tedious. : (.
I wonder if the first half of the book I managed to hear did not included a whole hour of just hearing syntax.

I crave the material, and have ordered the physical book because it will be important to SEE the binary in order to digest it, rather than hear it. I'd like to SEE the equations and intuitively follow along. I couldn't keep order of the sequences in my head and it lost it's meaning and just became a thorn to get over.

Wonderful, but PDF Recommended

WARNING: This book is relatively dense, and many of the chapters were intended to be read (as opposed to listened to).
I strongly recommend obtaining a pdf in order to follow the more dense material. Mathematics that is fairly easy to follow when reading can be quite difficult to follow when listening. For example, something as simple as "(1 + 3 + (5 - 2))" is read as "open parenthesis one plus three plus open parenthesis five minus two close parenthesis close parenthesis". The narrator also does not seem to be comfortable reading mathematical notation, and so expressions like "f(x)" are read as "F open parenthesis X closed parenthesis" instead of just "F of X".
With that disclaimer, I strongly recommend the book. He does a fantastic job synthesizing computation theory, mathematical foundations, philosophy, and physics into a coherent view of the mind.

Get the Printed Book

I purchased this without thinking. Have had the printed book for many years and thought it would be nice to listen to again. The reader is actually very talented but the content does not lend itself to audio. Like listening to your calculus and analytic geometry text. It is actually faster to read the text. I found myself giggling as the reader read zeros and ones and whatever. Who could follow that. Another option might be to listen while you read. The content of this book is absolutely marvelous and the point that intelligence is more than computation is something that we need to pay attention to. Penrose is a genius. A newer book making many of the same points is The Myth of Artificial Intelligence by Erik Larson. Larson's book is engaging and good for listening.

Not read like the math it is.

Early on, Penrose delves into very specific Turing machine codes, which the narrator gamely reads aloud as long minutes of zeroes, ones and other primitive tokens which are opaque in spoken form. Lamentably, the medium does not do justice to the message.
Worse, instead of reading (say) “f(x)” as“f of x,” it’s rendered as “f open parenthesis x close parenthesis,” suggesting the erudite-sounding reader missed out on math, or apprenticed as a typesetter.
This review may be premature— maybe skimming ahead to the material on psychophysics will justify my time with this book as a prelude to “Shadows of Mind” and later work.

Do What?

Interesting tour of cosmology and qntm thry, anyway
Listening is perhaps not the best way to experience it..need to see the symbols spelled out,.
Godel's thrm is sophistry and the crux of the book hangs in it..tenuously, if I'm any judge.
i was hoping for a stronger finish..hoping penrose would come up w something really compelling on consciousness. but i lost mine several times.

Great work, but support material is badly needed!

It would be essential to have an attached pdf, or other document with the relevant equations, to make it possible to understand the content even for a mortal soul without an extraordinardinary attention span.