I heard Roger Penrose interviewed on Desert Island Discs. Certainly he is a proper grounded mathematician and scientist (look up his Wikipedia entry). He’s worth listening to (unlike soap-box orators like Richard Dawkins).

I was struck by his representation of Artificial Intelligence as fundamentally an algorithm – since it will forever lack mind and consciousness. So I’ve been looking into his views. Just a couple of quotes below. Science is certainly NOT consistent with materialist atheism as some would have us believe ..

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.

Intelligence cannot be present without understanding. No computer has any awareness of what it does.

I would say the universe has a purpose. It’s not there just somehow by chance.

our present picture of physical reality, particularly in relation to the nature of time, is due for a grand shake up