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	8.4
	Author: Roger Penrose Excerpt: In his bestseilling work of popular science, Roger Penrose takes us on a fascinating roller-coaster ride through the basic principles of physics, cosmology, mathematics, and philosophy to show that human thinking can never be emulated by a machine. .: Buy at Amazon.com :. .: Buy at Amazon.co.uk :.

The main arguments against Artificial Intelligence is that computer lack a certain element (spirituality?) that humans have, and computer will never gain. In my opinion, this argument is competely pointless since this element cannot be pinpointed, explained, or even named! So, quite how it can be used as an argument against anything avoids me.

I was fed up with anti-AI arguments such as the above, but wanted to read a book with a well thought-out, planned and understandable stance against Artificial Intelligence. I found it in The Emperor's New Mind by the famous scientist/mathematician, Roger Penrose.

Penrose starts the book asserting that not everything can be performed algorithmically. The irony of it is that it was Alan Turing that helped prove this fact with his Turing Machines! After a discussion of Turing Machines and 'strong-AI', Penrose ventures off into the world of mathmatics with a chapter on fractals. He does not return to the subject of Artificial Intelligence (or indeed computing) until the last two chapters of the book!

I have learnt so much from this book, but not about Artificial Intelligence. I've had an introduction to fractals, logic, relativity, space-travel, parallel dimensions, space-time, infinite-dimensional space, black holes, white holes, quantum mechanics, theories of time, and the story of the universe! Quite impressive, just to refute the concept of AI! It was here that the best and the worst part of the book was. Luckily I am easily entertained, therefore most of the lengthy non-AI chapters didn't pose a problem for me. The 'Quantum Mechanics' chapter however was a real hurdle. It took me as long to read that one chapter as it did the rest of the book simply because I was not interested and the sheer complexity of the chapter meant the reading pace was dreadfully slow. In short, you really must be interested in most/all of these topics to read this book - pure AI enthusiasts will not get much from this book. In Penrose's defensive, he tackled the huge domain of refuting Artificial Intelligence eloquently and creatively.

After this immense tour of modern physics and mathematics, Penrose once again returns to the subject of Artificial Intelligence and sets about piecing everything he'd laid out in front of you together to form a very good argument against AI. The last chapter of the book was some of the most excellent writing I have read in a long time. He comes up with some very outfield arguments and propositions - but all of them incredibly interesting. Here is an example of one such idea:

"...Recall my proposal that conciousness, in essense, is the 'seeing' of a necessary truth; and that it may represent some kind of actual contact with Plato's world of ideal mathematical concepts. Recall that Plato's world is itself timeless. The perception of Platonic truth carries no information - in the technical sense of the 'information' that can be transmitted by a message - and there would be no actual contradition involved if such a conscious perception were even to be propagated backwards in time!..." - p.577