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I'm with Phaedrus on this. Penrose is not a materialist, though he might be a physicalist.

materialism - The view that everything that actually exists is material, or physical.

physicalism - The view that everything that is real is, in some sense, really physical.

So spell out two things for me. First give me an example of something that is physical, but not material (don't bother with quantum effects, we've discussed that and you know my position). Then explain to me what part of Penrose's beliefs regarding consciousness (which in his words are summarized as "Appropriate physical action of the brain evokes awareness, but this physical action cannot even be properly simulated computationally.") are not attributable to the action of material, because I'm missing that completely.

And he asserts that consciousness cannot be simulated. He is not a computationalist.

That has nothing to do with materialism. Penrose, in fact, spent at least one chapter giving examples of fully deterministic systems that are not computable.

Thank you so much for your post, Physicist!

Jeepers, this conversation reminds me a lot of the ones we've already had on observer, value and evolution.

This, from the same link Dictionary of Philosphy of Mind - ought to help clear things up:

As used in the philosophy of science, physicalism is the view that all factual knowledge can be formulated as a statement about physical objects and activities. Thus, the language of science can be reduced to third person descriptions.

The positivists defined the physical as that which can be described in the concepts of a language with an intersubjective observation basis. This could be called unity of science physicalism. It is the primary meaning of physicalism in the philosophy of science. Another type of physicalism might be called causal physicalism, the view that all causes are physical causes.

There is a lot of confusion in the philosophy of mind literature stemming from a tendency to take physicalism and materialism to be interchangeable.

In my layspeak, materialism is rooted in the belief that the physical world is all that there is. OTOH, physicalism says that all that there is, is in some way (but not necessarily every way) physical.

The physicalist, in my view, does not leap to the conclusion before he has made the observation, i.e. is not philosophically prejudiced. That's why I call Penrose a true scientist.

I see Francis Crick as a materialist. He believes the physical realm is all that there is, e.g. his book The Astonishing Hypothesis says that the soul is physically in the brain.

I see Roger Penrose as a physicalist. He says that some (but not all) of the inquiry into consciousness is beyond science and he does not address unconsciousness.

I also believe Penrose is Platonist, at least concerning such things as the Mandelbrot set. As I recall, this is the ongoing dispute between him and Hawking - as it was between Einstein and Gödel, who I also believe was Platonist.