Joe Rogan Experience #1216 - Sir Roger Penrose

All right, here we go. Three... (clears throat) Boom, and we're live. How are you, sir?

I'm fine, pretty good.

Thank you for doing this. I appreciate it.

That's fine. My pleasure.

Who roped you into this?

I think, I suppose James Tagg, probably. (laughs)

(laughs) I, uh, am a big fan of your work. I've read much of your work. I've seen many of your interviews and videos online. And, uh, one of the things that I really wanted to talk to you about, that I find quite interesting is consciousness.

Mm-hmm.

And your belief that consciousness is not simply calculation, but that there's something more to it, and what, what you think this more could possibly be from a scientific perspective, which is unusual 'cause a lot of people have some theories about consciousness, but they're usually crazy people like myself.

(laughs) Well, I mean, we're all conscious, and so we may have theories about it.

Yeah.

But, uh, no, the ideas came by somewhat roundabout route. Uh, I, I went to Cambridge to do graduate work. It was mathematics. I was working on pure mathematical subjects, algebra, geometry. But I thought, you know, "We got three years, I'll spend some of the time going to other talks that might be interesting." So I went to three talks particularly, which had a big influence on me. One was a talk by Hermann Bondi. It was on general relativity, cosmology. Wonderful talk with very sort of animated presentation he had. And then there was a talk by Paul Dirac, one of the founders of quantum mechanics. And his talk... well, his complete... wonderful talk, too. It was... Wonderful lectures as well, but in a completely different style. He was very quiet and precise in what he said and everything. And in the very first lecture, he was talking about the superposition principle in quantum mechanics. So if you have a particle and it could be in one spot, or it could be in another spot, then you have all sorts of states where it can be in both places at once. And he... That's sort of strange, but you got to get used to that idea. And he illustrated with this piece, a piece of chalk, and I think he broke it in two to illustrate it could be in one spot or in the other. And my mind sort of wandered at that point. I don't know what I was thinking about, but I wasn't concentrating. And about a few minutes later, he'd finished his description, his explanation, and I had some vague memory of something about energy, but I didn't understand what he said and I've been totally mystified by this ever since. So I, I suppose if I'd heard what he said, he would have said something to calm me down and, and make you sort of accept it in one way or another. But as it was, it seemed to me this was a, a major issue. How on earth do you have things that don't behave according to what quantum mechanic says? Like cricket balls and baseballs and things like that. Anyway, that's two of the talks. The other course was a course by a man called Steane, who talked on mathematical logic and he explained things like Godel's theorem and Turing machines, Turing machines being the mathematical notion upon which modern computers are based, or all computers basically. And, uh... (clears throat) Uh, the thing about Godel's theorem... You see, I'd heard... I used to have a colleague when I was an undergraduate, Ian Percival, who also became a scientist later on, and we talked about, uh, logic and, you know, how you could make these kind of mathematical systems which worked out logic. And I'd heard about this Godel's theorem, which seemed to say that there were things in mathematics that you just couldn't prove, and I didn't like that idea. But I... when I heard the... when I went to this course by Steane, and he explained what it really says. And what it says is, suppose you've got a method of proving things in mathematics, and when I say things, I mean things with numbers. The one famous example is Fermat's Last Theorem. Uh, there's the Goldbach conjecture, which isn't yet proved, that every even number bigger than two is the sum of two prime numbers. That's the sort of example of the thing. It's just sort of mathematical things about numbers, which you can see what they mean, uh, but it may be very difficult to see whether it's true or untrue. But the idea i- often is in mathematics, you've got a system of methods of proof, and the key thing about these methods of proof is that you can have a computer check whether you've done it right. So you... these rules, you know, they could be adding A and B, it's the same as B and A and things like that.