I finished up The Emporer’s New Mind
yesterday just before getting home from work. It’s an interesting book. The
strongest argument against machine consciousness seemed to be that which relies
on Godel’s work in number theory. Godel proved that there are some statements
which are obviously true, but cannot be proven by algorithmic means. Penrose
asserts that since we can intuit that these statements are true without being
able to prove them, there’s something clearly non-algorithmic going on in our
thought processes. He goes on to appeal to quantum mechanics and some of its
interesting implications to demonstrate how this might work on a physical level
— the latter admitted conjecture, but intriguing
nonetheless.