The Emperor's New Mind

The Emperor's New Mind is a 1989 book by the mathematical physicist Roger Penrose, published under the title The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics. It is a work of popular science aimed at curious readers with a scientific background but no specialist training. In Spanish it appeared in 1991, first from Grijalbo and shortly afterwards from Mondadori.

The book's central thesis is that human consciousness is non-algorithmic and therefore cannot be fully modelled by a Turing machine or a conventional digital computer. Penrose argues that understanding the mind requires quantum mechanics, and he proposes as a hypothesis that the collapse of the quantum wavefunction plays an important role in brain function. He presents this idea as speculative.

Much of the book reviews, in interrelated chapters, Newtonian physics, special and general relativity, the philosophy and limits of mathematics, quantum physics, cosmology and the nature of time. Penrose shows at each step how the topic bears on his argument, and the later sections address consciousness directly. The book won the Aventis Prize in 1990. After its publication Penrose began collaborating with Stuart Hameroff on a biological model involving microtubules, which he later developed in Shadows of the Mind. Several experts in philosophy, computer science and robotics have criticised his thesis.