Does life in some way make use of the potentiality for vast quantum superpositions, as would be required for serious quantum computation? How importa… - Roger Penrose

Beneath all this technicality is the feeling that it is indeed "obvious" that the conscious mind cannot work like a computer, even though much of what is involved in mental activity might do so. This is the kind of obviousness that a child can see—though the child may, later in life, become browbeaten into believing that the obvious problems are "non-problems", to be argued into nonexistence by careful reasoning and clever choices of definition. Children sometimes see things clearly that are obscured in later life. We often forget the wonder that we felt as children when the cares of the "real world" have begun to settle on our shoulders. Children are not afraid to pose basic questions that may embarrass us, as adults, to ask. What happens to each of our streams of consciousness after we die; where was it before we were born; might we become, or have been, someone else; why do we perceive at all; why are we here; why is there a universe here at all in which we can actually be? These are puzzles that tend to come with the awakenings of awareness in any one of us—and, no doubt, with the awakening of self-awareness, within whichever creature or other entity it first came.

According to this view, the mind is always capable of this direct contact. But only a little may come through at a time. Mathematical discovery consists of broadening the area of contact. Because of the fact that mathematical truths are necessary truths, no actual 'information', in the technical sense, passes to the discoverer. All the information was there all the time. It was just a matter of putting things together and 'seeing' the answer! This is very much in accordance with Plato's own idea that (say mathematical) discovery is just a form of remembering! Indeed, I have often been struck by the similarity between just not being able to remember someone's name, and just not being able to find the right mathematical concept. In each case, the sought-for concept is in a sense already present in the mind, though this is a less usual form of words in the case of an undiscovered mathematical idea.

It's a very plausible thing now that the entropy should increase all the time... [T]hese volumes... are... enormously different in scale... I can't convey to you in the picture the absolute stupendous difference in the sizes of these volumes. So if you happen to find yourself in one of them, and you wiggle around, the next one you find yourself in will be overwhelmingly likely to be much much larger, and the entropy therefor goes up.