I am Roger Penrose. 
I am the Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics
at the University of Oxford. 
I've been interested in issues 
 to do with consciousness
 and its connection with
the issues in physics
for many years.
I certainly hope that this conference will 
be an opportunity
to convey ideas
of deep importance
in how science
 is trying to grapple with these questions of consciousness
and to promote these ideas to the general public
and the arguments that go on between
different points of view
which will go on, and which must go on 
for a long time to come
There is a current view that consciousness is something 
which arises
from some complicated computation.
So we have our computers, and
people think that
because they can do
things amazingly fast, and they can calculate very quickly
and they can play chess extremely well
that they are superior to us even
 and it is only some
complicated aspect of this
computational activity
that somehow
consciousness
arises from that
Now my view is quite different from this.
I think there is a lot of computational activity
going on in the brain
but this is basically unconscious.
So consciousness seems to me
to be something quite different.
What we do when we understand something 
is not computing. 
There's something else going on.
And at the same time
I'm a great believer in science
and what's going on in our heads 
is still
 the same laws that are going on in the universe outside us.
However, those laws
are not things that we necessarily fully understand today. 
To be understanding something, you need to be aware of it.
And to be aware of it, you're conscious of it. 
And so you are invoking your consciousness. 
So to me
there is something outside the computational laws of physics. 
And when I wrote my book, "The Emperor's New Mind"
I was trying to develop this idea, and I was trying to say, well, there is something else out there.
What could it be?
Where is the biggest gap in our understanding of physics?
There are lots of gaps 
we don't know what governs the masses of particles
we don't know all sorts of detailed things. 
But most of these things don't have a direct bearing
on what the brain does
it's the wrong scale. 
There is a big gap in
 our understanding of the laws
big gap
 is within present-day quantum mechanics. 
There are two procedures in quantum mechanics, the Schrödinger equation
 and the making of the measurement, and they're inconsistent. 
I say it quite strongly, it's not just that we haven't got the right
 interpretation of quantum mechanics, they're just inconsistent. Now that's interesting. 
If there is a huge gap
maybe that gap
is where
that theory has to be outside a
computational system
 Now many people will dispute that, and they'll say this is
taking your logic too far, and so on. 
But it seems to me
that there is logic in this.
The next step, though, is the one that people mostly question.
Because if inside our heads 
we are exploiting that gap
that means
that we have quantum development in the system which takes us
to a level
somewhat beyond
 present technology in our experiments.
Experiments still support quantum mechanics
and we have not yet seen
where something new has to come in.
But there are good reasons, in my opinion
when we look back
 to these two major revolutions in 20th century physics
quantum mechanics on the one hand
Einstein's theory of general relativity
space-time is not flat, it's curved
gravity is not a force, somehow it's a curvature
 there is something 
quite different from other kinds of physics that is going on there.
If you bring these two great theories
together, we see this conflict,
which suggests strongly
that there must be a change in the rules of quantum mechanics at a certain level.
And that certain level is not too unreasonable that it should be relevant in the brain. 
Because it has to do with the movement of mass, 
which is very big for 
quantum mechanics experiments
but very tiny even for things in biology. 
So we're looking for tiny displacements of mass, 
that's the Schrödinger's cat if you like, it can be in two places at the same time
but then it spontaneously becomes one or the other. 
And in its becoming one or the other, it's doing something
non-computational.
Now when I wrote "The Emperor's New Mind", I knew something about nerve propagation
but it seemed to me that there was no chance, because in nerve propagation
 it disturbs the rest of the brain in a way which would completely destroy
the coherence that you would need in your quantum system
to be able to probe
this new level of quantum mechanics.
But still, I thought when I finished writing this book, maybe I would see the answer. 
But no, I didn't. 
But the answer, in a certain sense
may have come because
Stuart Hameroff 
read my book
and he contacted me, and said, well look
maybe you don't know
about these things in the brain
these microtubules, and I thought, microtubules, what's that?
In my ignorance, I didn't know about them. 
If I had, I might have said, 
maybe that's a good place to look.
You could conceivably imagine the kind of isolation that was necessary. 
It still goes beyond
normal people's understanding
of the kind of isolation you would expect to find in a cell
but there is a reasonable chance. And since it happens, since we are 
conscious, we can understand things, we seem to do things
which go beyond a purely computational activity, 
the logic is, maybe this is in the microtubules, because that's the best
candidate I've ever seen.
So we got together, and then we developed ideas from that.
My ideas came from the physics, from the
feeling that in order to understand consciousness we need
 this kind of level 
of coherent quantum mechanics
and that state reduction
has to come in
 so the idea, the O.R., if you like, has to be part of the scheme.
But then exactly why
what part of the brain's involved and what is the neurochemistry
what are the structures in the brain
that's all Stuart's,
So mine is on the physics side, and his is on the biological side.
