"Some years ago, I wrote a book called The Emperor's New Mind and that book was describing a point of view I had about consciousness and why it was not something that comes about from complicated calculations. So we are not exactly computers. There's something else going on and the question of what this something else was would depend on some detailed physics and so I needed chapters in that book, which describes the physics as it is understood today. Well anyway, this book was written and various people commented to me and they said perhaps I could use this book for a course Physics for Poets or whatever it is if it didn't have all that contentious stuff about the mind in that. So I thought, well, that doesn't sound too hard, all I'll do is get out the scissor out and snip out all the bits, which have something to do with the mind. The trouble is that if I did that — and I actually didn't do it — the whole book fell to pieces really because the whole driving force behind the book was this quest to find out what could it be that constitutes consciousness in the physical world as we know it or as we hope to know it in future"

“Understanding is, after all, what science is all about — and science is a great deal more than mindless computation.”

“What right do we have to claim, as some might, that human beings are the only inhabitants of our planet blessed with an actual ability to be "aware"? … The impression of a "conscious presence" is indeed very strong with me when I look at a dog or a cat or, especially, when an ape or monkey at the zoo looks at me. I do not ask that they are "self-aware" in any strong sense . All I ask is that they sometimes simply feel!”

“It seems to me that we must make a distinction between what is "objective" and what is "measurable" in discussing the question of physical reality, according to quantum mechanics. The state-vector of a system is, indeed, not measurable, in the sense that one cannot ascertain, by experiments performed on the system, precisely what the state is; but the state-vector does seem to be a completely objective property of the system, being completely characterized by the results it must give to experiments that one might perform.”

“General relativity is certainly a very beautiful theory, but how does one judge the elegance of physical theories generally?”

“Science and the Mind" audio lecture and diagrams online”

“One is left with the uneasy feeling that even if supersymmetry is actually false, as a feature of nature, and that accordingly no supersymmetry partners are ever found by the LHC or by any later more powerful accelerator, then the conclusion that some supersymmetry proponents might come to would not be that supersymmetry is false for the actual particles of nature, but merely that the level of supersymmetry breaking must be greater even that the level reached at that moment, and that a new even more powerful machine would be required to observe it!”