Roger Penrose Thinking Quotations

But I think it is a serious issue to wonder about the other platonic absolutes of say beauty and morality.

My own way of thinking is to ponder long and I hope deeply on problems and for a long time which I keep away for years and years and I never really let them go.

People think of these eureka moments and my feeling is that they tend to be little things, a little realisation and then a little realisation built on that.

And these little things may not seem like much but after a while they take you off on a direction where you may be a long way off from what other people have been thinking about.

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.

There is a certain sense in which I would say the universe has a purpose. It's not there just somehow by chance. Some people take the view that the universe is simply there and it runs along-it's a bit as though it just sort of computes, and we happen by accident to find ourselves in this thing. I don't think that's a very fruitful or helpful way of looking at the universe, I think that there is something much deeper about it, about its existence, which we have very little inkling of at the moment.

It is always the case, with mathematics, that a little direct experience of thinking over things on your own can provide a much deeper understanding than merely reading about them.