Penrose hypothesizes that: In 1931, the mathematician and logician Kurt Gödel proved his incompleteness theorems, showing that any effectively generated theory capable of expressing elementary arithmetic cannot be both consistent and complete.

The essence of Penrose's argument is that while a formal proof system cannot, because of the theorem, prove its own incompleteness, Gödel-type results are provable by human mathematicians.

Penrose proposes that a quantum state remains in superposition until the difference in space-time curvature reaches a significant level.

When he wrote his first consciousness book, The Emperor's New Mind in 1989, Penrose lacked a detailed proposal for how such quantum processes could be implemented in the brain.

Subsequently, Stuart Hameroff read The Emperor's New Mind and suggested to Penrose that microtubules within brain cells were suitable candidate sites for quantum processing and ultimately for consciousness.

[5] Penrose's views on the human thought process are not widely accepted in certain scientific circles (Drew McDermott,[7] David Chalmers[8] and others).

In May 1995, Stanford mathematician Solomon Feferman attacked Penrose's approach on multiple grounds, including the mathematical validity of his Gödelian argument and theoretical background.

[10] John Searle criticises Penrose's appeal to Gödel as resting on the fallacy that all computational algorithms must be capable of mathematical description.

[11] Penrose and Stuart Hameroff have constructed the Orch-OR theory in which human consciousness is the result of quantum gravity effects in microtubules.

The reception of the article is summed up by this statement in his support: "Physicists outside the fray, such as IBM's John Smolin, say the calculations confirm what they had suspected all along.