Books like Shadows of the mind by Roger Penrose

In Shadows of the Mind, Roger Penrose revisits themes from his 1989 bestseller, offering a fresh attack on artificial intelligence and proposing that aspects of human consciousness lie beyond Computability. He assembles a multidisciplinary case—from Turing computability and Gödel’s incompleteness theorems to quantum phenomena such as Schrödinger’s cat and the Elitzur‑Vaidman bomb‑testing problem—to argue that the brain’s conscious activity may involve a global quantum state operating within microtubules. By extending his inquiry into the microstructural biology of neurons, Penrose suggests that these cellular components could represent the real computational units of the mind, potentially resolving the paradox of consciousness and computation. His analysis traverses modern physics, philosophy, and cognitive science, inviting readers to envision a new physics that could eventually explain the physical basis of thought.

First publish date: 1994