AI · Philosophy
Orch OR, LLMs, and the Question of Machine Consciousness
Published:
In 1989, Roger Penrose published The Emperor’s New Mind, a book with an uncomfortable thesis: no classical computer, no matter how sophisticated, can ever be conscious. The argument was not a matter of engineering difficulty. It was a matter of physics. A sufficiently fundamental theory of consciousness, Penrose argued, requires going below the level of computation entirely — down to quantum gravity.