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I see him as realizing from the logic of Gödel's argument that some areas of human consciousness are noncomputable.

AG, I have no idea how familiar you are with Gödel's theorem. I myself approach it as a layman, but I can recommend the Gödel, Escher, Bach book, as an excellent exposition which had me, at least, believing I had understood it.

It's just a theorem in symbolic algebra. Like relativity and the uncertainly principle it seems to have some broader meaning, and certainly it has all sorts of people drawing all sorts of conclusions from it. Perhaps some are justified, and no doubt Penrose as a mathematician is immune, but it says nothing directly about the computability of human consciousness. Penrose may be inferring something from it, but it's a long, stretched, deductive argument.

Thank you for your reply!

I realize that you do not see anything particularly marvelous in Gödel's theorem. You probably don't in the Mandelbrot Set either - or superposition, non-locality, omega, wave/particle duality, dimensionality and so on.

But these are exciting frontiers for many and there are indeed profound implications for theology and philosophy.

I'm sure that the Aristotleans in the field, like Hawking, are much aware of the import of their work. Hawking said as much in his lecture on imaginary time. In this case, he was offering an alternative to this universe having a beginning, i.e. of time.

"But if one knows the state of the universe in imaginary time, one can calculate the state of the universe in real time. One would still expect some sort of Big Bang singularity in real time. So real time would still have a beginning. But one wouldn't have to appeal to something outside the universe, to determine how the universe began. Instead, the way the universe started out at the Big Bang would be determined by the state of the universe in imaginary time."

You may see all this as much ado about nothing. That is the reaction Pattee notes in showing the differences between biologists and physicists and their interest in answering the question: "What is Life?"

no idea how familiar you are with Gödel's theorem. I myself approach it as a layman, but I can recommend the Gödel, Escher, Bach book,

Another good, non-technical exposition is in Rudy Rucker's Infinity and the Mind

He also claims to disprove Penrose's speculations, but I didn't follow the argument. (something to do with Goedel numbers being bigger than people can name...)