The point is incidental to this essay, but Penrose’s idea is not a “mysterious answer to a mysterious question”. The question is: How could the human brain do more than a universal Turing machine can? The answer is: By there being an objective wavefunction collapse process which is noncomputable in its dynamics and relevant to cognition. Penrose is not even trying to solve the problem of consciousness, though he flags it as an important issue; his theory is an exercise in the physics of hypercomputation. He is motivated by an interpretation of Gödel’s results which most people do not share, but then all you can say is that it is a complicated answer to an irrelevant question.
The point is incidental to this essay, but Penrose’s idea is not a “mysterious answer to a mysterious question”. The question is: How could the human brain do more than a universal Turing machine can? The answer is: By there being an objective wavefunction collapse process which is noncomputable in its dynamics and relevant to cognition. Penrose is not even trying to solve the problem of consciousness, though he flags it as an important issue; his theory is an exercise in the physics of hypercomputation. He is motivated by an interpretation of Gödel’s results which most people do not share, but then all you can say is that it is a complicated answer to an irrelevant question.