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

Intelligence cannot be present without understanding. No computer has any awareness of what it does.

But I think it is a serious issue to wonder about the other platonic absolutes of say beauty and morality.

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.

And these little things may not seem like much but after a while they take you off on a direction where you may be a long way off from what other people have been thinking about.

This book is about physics and its about physics and its relationship with mathematics and how they seem to be intimately related and to what extent can you explore this relationship and trust it.

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 (up to proportionality) what the state is; but the state-vector does seem to be (again up to proportionality) a completely objective property of the system, being completely characterized by the results it must give to experiments that one might perform.