Between The Motion And The Act...:A review of "Shadows of the Mind" by Roger Penrose

1.1 In these comments I want to leave aside entirely whether human mathematical understanding is achieved solely through the manipulation of linguistic symbols by syntactically specifiable rules, i.e. whether it is solely a matter of humans performing a computation. I also want to leave aside the problems that arise in interpreting quantum theory, in particular the measurement problem. Those problems stand on their own quite independent of Gödel's theorem. Rather, I want to focus explicitly on how Gödel's theorem, together with facts about human mathematical understanding, could conceivably have any bearing on physics, that is, on how the first part of Shadows of the Mind is related to the second. I want chiefly to argue the reflections arising from Gödel's theorem and human cognitive capacities do not, and could not, have any bearing on physics.