Curt Jaimungal Talking With Roger Penrose

Roger Penrose had just been here in Cambridge, speaking at the TWT Conference (TWT stands for Twistor Theory, I guess). He talks about his relationship with his fellow student Michael Atiyah and also about Alexander Grothendieck.  He talks about Conformal Cyclic Cosmology too, about which he wrote a whole book in 2010. He says it's outrageous. The theory, not just the book! See Cycles of Time and Elle Cordova - Sub-atomic Particles Hang Out in The Universe Saloon.

As a graduate student at Cambridge, he attended a talk on Mathematical Logic by S.W.P. Steen. See this review of Steen's 1973 book Mathematical Logic with special reference to the natural numbers, available on the Internet Archive here.

The first page of the introduction seems very promising:

If that bit about two-dimensional blood flow sounds a bit cracked then see Two-dimensional Flow.  S.W.P. Steen was a fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge, as was Jan Smuts, for a brief period in 1917. See Christ's At War: S.W.P. Steen’s War. Steen's description, on pages 2 and 3 of the Introduction, of two different ways to use syntax language is intriguing. People with two-dimensional blood-flow in their brains won't understand that.

Roger Penrose may well be this century's greatest living physicist, but he's a terrible philosopher! He should listen to Amanda Gefter: Amanda Gefter and Curt Jaimungal Talk Physics and Philosophy.

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See my comment:

42:30 On consciousness and wave-function collapse. Penrose is a die-hard reductionist and this is his mind-body problem. If he could take seriously the fact that experimental physicists have agency and that their actions in setting up an experiment in a laboratory are conscious then I don't think there is an issue, but maybe he doesn't want to allow consciousness to have an existence aside from being an effect of interaction of massive particles of some kind. I tried to explain the role of mathematics in the description of physical experiments in this video I made a few months ago https://youtu.be/8pxJ6_2J7Fg in it I get as far as mumbling about how Category Theory "Abstract Nonsense" comes into the picture in a quite sensible way, because it is all about translating descriptions of experimental conditions between different actual physical situations which are the invariants or models of the theory.