A computer is a great device because it enables you to do anything which is automatic, anything that you don't need your understanding for. Understanding is outside a computer. It doesn't understand.

When I was in Cambridge reading mathematics, I went to Amsterdam for the International Mathematics Congress. There I saw M.C. Escher's fascinating work. That inspired me to try my hand at drawing such impossibilities.

If the computer-guided robots turn out to be our superiors in every respect, then will they not find that they can run the world better without the need of us at all? Humanity itself will then have become obsolete.

I used to make polyhedra with my father. There were no clear lines between games and toys for children and his professional work.

My father himself was a human geneticist who was recognized for demonstrating that older mothers tend to get more Down syndrome children, but he had lots of scientific interests.

Quantum entanglement is a very intriguing issue, but it is not impossible.

My younger brother ended up the British chess champion 10 times, a record.

My older brother is a distinguished theoretical physicist, a fellow of the Royal Society.

I think I am intrigued by paradoxes. If something seems to be a paradox, it has something deeper, something worth exploring.

Might we... be doing something with our brains that cannot be described in computational terms at all? How do our feelings of conscious awareness - of happiness, pain, love, aesthetic sensibility, will, understanding, etc. - fit into such a computational picture?