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Non-local aspects of perception: do these require a quantum-mechanical explanation?

Professor Sir Roger Penrose, FRS

There are well-confirmed quantum-mechanical effects that have a holistic character, in the sense that widely separated parts of a quantum system behave as though they are, nevertheless, connected in a mysterious way. These are known as Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen, or EPR, effects. The suggestion has been made from time to time that the binding problem of conscious perception - whereby separated parts of the brain can together contribute to a perceived scene - may actually depend on EPR effects. There are clear-cut experimental signals for this kind of thing and specific experimental ideas have been put forward by Andrew Duggins. These will be discussed in the lecture, together with some suggestions for the physical basis of conscious perception.

Professor Sir Roger Penrose, FRS is Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford and the recipient of countless prizes and honours. He is best known for several popular books on physics and the mind, as well as for his fundamental work in general relativity theory, while his fascination with geometry has led to some curious but important discoveries. Like Stephen Hawking, Penrose has contributed a great deal to the understanding of black holes. His discovery in 1964 that a collapsing star must, after a certain point, continue its collapse to infinite density (irrespective of symmetry assumptions) showed that black holes are a clear implication of Einstein's general relativity. His cosmic censorship hypothesis of 1969 suggested that such infinite density regions are always hidden from an outside observer. Professor Penrose has frequently applied his imagination to inventing unusual geometrical figures. Most importantly, he discovered the intriguing Penrose tiles, whose unexpected properties are still being investigated. His publications include The Emperor's New Mind (OUP, 1989; translated into 14 languages); Shadows of the Mind (OUP, 1994); The Nature of Space and Time (with Stephen Hawking, Princeton, 1996); The Large, the Small and the Human Mind (CUP, 1997).