14 quotes
Children are not afraid to pose basic questions that may embarrass us, as adults, to ask.
The Emperor's New Mind (1989)
Understanding is, after all, what science is all about — and science is a great deal more than mindless computation.
Does life in some way make use of the potentiality for vast quantum superpositions, as would be required for serious quantum computation?
Children sometimes see things clearly that are obscured in later life.
The Emperor's New Mind (1989)
It seems to me that we must make a distinction between what is "objective" and what is "measurable" in discussing the question of physical reality, according to quantum mechanics.
The Emperor's New Mind (1989)
There are two other words I do not understand — awareness and intelligence.
General relativity is certainly a very beautiful theory, but how does one judge the elegance of physical theories generally?
Fashion, Faith, and Fantasy in the New Physics of the Universe (2016)
It is hard to see how one could begin to develop a quantum-theoretical description of brain action when one might well have to regard the brain as "observing itself" all the time!
The Emperor's New Mind (1989)
I have been arguing that such 'God-given' mathematical ideas should have some kind of timeless existence, independent of our earthly selves.
The Emperor's New Mind (1989)
What the anthropic principle depends upon is the idea that whatever is the nature of the universe, or universe portion that we see about us, being subject to whatever dynamical laws govern its actions, this must be strongly favourable to our very existence.
Fashion, Faith, and Fantasy in the New Physics of the Universe (2016)
Do not seek for reasons in the specific patterns of stars, or of other scattered arrangements of objects; look, instead, for a deeper universal order in the way that things behave.
The Road to Reality (2004)
It's illegal to make superpositions with different vacua. That's one of the rules of quantum field theory.
The idea of having an ambient space-time of some specific dimension seems to play less of a role of string theory than in conventional physics, and certainly less than the kind of role that I would myself feel comfortable with. It is particularly difficult to assess the functional freedom that is involved in a physical theory unless one has a clear idea of its actual space-time dimensionality.
Fashion, Faith, and Fantasy in the New Physics of the Universe (2016)
Some years ago, I wrote a book called The Emperor's New Mind and that book was describing a point of view I had about consciousness and why it was not something that comes about from complicated calculations. So we are not exactly computers.