Shadows of the Mind

‘One of the most important works…of the twentieth century’ The TimesShadows of the Mind is a profound exploration of what modern physics has to tell us about the human mind.A visionary description of what a new physics - one that is adequate to account for our extraordinary brain - might look like. A physicist asks what science is still missing about consciousness How far can the human mind be explained as a machine processing information? Roger Penrose argues that the answer may expose a fundamental gap in present-day science. Shadows of the Mind explores what modern physics can tell us about consciousness and develops Penrose’s case that something in conscious mental activity transcends computation. If that is true, he argues, a complete account of the mind will require more than existing computational models of the brain. The book therefore looks towards a new physics capable of addressing both the extraordinary capacities of human thought and the biological processes from which consciousness emerges. Penrose’s argument is deliberately ambitious: the puzzle of mind may not sit within one established scientific discipline, but at the point where our understanding of physics, biology and cognition remains incomplete. For readers drawn to the hardest questions about consciousness, intelligence and the limits of scientific explanation, this is a sustained challenge to purely computational accounts of the mind. ‘One of the most important works…of the twentieth century’ The Times