Consciousness, collapse and tokens

Sun, 07 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Consciousness cannot be an algorithm

In 1989, Roger Penrose — British mathematical physicist, the one who proved black holes are inevitable in general relativity, Nobel Prize 2020 — publishes The Emperor’s New Mind¹ and makes a claim that infuriates half the academic world: human consciousness is not computable.

The reasoning goes like this. Gödel proved that for any sufficiently powerful formal system, there exist truths the system cannot prove. If the brain were a computer — a formal system executing algorithms — there would be things we couldn’t understand. But we do understand them (mathematical insight, for instance). Ergo: the brain is doing something no algorithm, given any amount of time and memory, can ever do.

Consciousness on madeddu.xyz

Consciousness, collapse and tokens

Consciousness cannot be an algorithm