Encapsulated this is Penrose's argument in a crude fashion 1. Humans can perform Turing-uncomputable operations (mathematicians mainly) 2. All of present day p

Encapsulated this is Penrose's argument in a crude fashion 1. Humans can perform Turing-uncomputable operations (mathematicians mainly) 2. All of present day physics is computable 3. So there should be some uncomputable physics yet to be discovered. 4. Penrose feels this new physics should be in quantum mechanics. A small video of Penrose's argument : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Gl6aThSs1s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Gl6aThSs1s On one hand the very notion that a computing device is conscious is patently ridiculous. Why? Because everything computes something. Even my fan computes a function so does the engine of a car[1], but are those artifacts conscious? The only honest answer is to say that this is a difficult problem. This is a very good interview of David Chalmers (the philosopher who originated the term "Hard problem of consciousness") that I found on HN sometime back http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NK1Yo6VbRoo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NK1Yo6VbRoo Obligatory XKCD reference: Can a bunch of rocks be conscious? http://xkcd.com/505/ http://xkcd.com/505/ [1] Very trivially they compute the function which describes their dynamics.