Roger Penrose - Artificial Intelligence Versus Natural Intelligence

This book contains the transcriptions of the talks and the debate between Roger Penrose and Emanuele Severino that took place during the conference Artificial Intelligence vs Natural Intelligence, held in Milano, at the Cariplo Congress Center, on May 12, 2018.

Besides the keynote speeches of Penrose and Severino, there were the illuminating talks of Giuseppe Vitiello (theoretical physicist), Mauro D'Ariano (theoretical physicist), and Ines Testoni (psychologist), which gave rise to the three essays completing this book.

The conference was conceived and organized (like the previous one on Determinism and Free Will) by a group of friends and colleagues: Fabio Scardigli, Marcello Esposito, and Marco Dotti. Our warmest thanks go to our colleague Massimo Blasone for his help during the workshops days.

The success of the conference was somehow astonishing, even greater than that of the previous meeting. More than 600 people crowded into the main hall of the Cariplo Congress Center and into two adjacent rooms, equipped with closed circuit television. This vividly testifies to the great interest that the general public has for the themes of Artificial Intelligence, Theory of Consciousness, Intelligent devices, and all that.

Regarding those topics usually grouped under the heading AI (Artificial Intelligence), the perspectives of the two main speakers, the mathematical physicist Roger Penrose and the philosopher Emanuele Severino, are obviously quite different. Nevertheless, as the reader will soon discover, both agree that we do not yet have intelligent devices, and also that, if we follow the vision of the so-called Strong AI (presently still the mainstream), we will never be able to build such devices. This opinion is also supported by the authors of the other essays in the book, although with their own slant.

In his main talk, Penrose focuses on the relations between the words intelligence, understanding, and consciousness. Being a mathematician, he kids, connections among words are more important to me than their true meaning. Relations among concepts are more illuminating than substantial definitions, in other words. Therefore Penrose starts from the idea that the word intelligence, at least in the standard usage, implies understanding, and understanding requires some awareness or consciousness. Going through different examples, discussed in great detail, Penrose shows that the machines, or software, at our disposal today are computational devices, maybe very sophisticated, but all essentially based on the ideal prototype of the Turing Machine. Intelligence and understanding, on the other hand, seem to exhibit properties that escape simple computability. Intelligence is something more than mere computational ability. Examples taken from chess, mathematical induction (the intriguing Goodstein theorem), the tiling of the Euclidean plane (polyominoes, which cannot be produced through computable algorithms), all converge to show that understanding is something which is not achieved by rules. So, a general quality of understanding seems to be that it is not an algorithm. Hence, understanding, according to Penrose, is not an element or a result of a (very) complicated application of a set of rules (algorithm).

Penrose then reviews the two main theoretical pillars of modern physics, namely General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, and points out that there is only one specific element of modern physics that cannot be reproduced on a computer, because it is not computable. To be precise, it is the measurement process in Quantum Mechanics, the so called collapse of the wave function. This is not described by the Schroedinger equation, and cannot be implemented (not even in principle) by any computable algorithm.