Roger Penrose is a brilliant thinker with unusual views on consciousness and artificial intelligence. My notes come from a Lex Fridman interview on whether consciousness can be computed, and from the book below.
On physics, Penrose says in that interview that Paul Dirac quietly treated quantum mechanics as a temporary theory. We still lack a theory of how the wave function collapses. Physics is essentially stuck. Quantum mechanics has to change to include gravity, rather than gravity simply being made quantum.
In a later talk he describes two kinds of reality. A classical state can be ascertained. A quantum state “can be confirmed but it cannot be ascertained”, and he counts it as real. His gravity idea is a minority view, and its simplest version has been ruled out. I side with him on the larger point: quantum mechanics is incomplete, and we have not cracked that nut.
On consciousness, he names three parts: intelligence, awareness, and understanding. He finds the easiest way in through anesthesia, where we do know how consciousness can be switched off. His main insights seem to start there.
In The Emperor’s New Mind he proposed that consciousness starts at the quantum level inside neurons. He admits the idea is a guess, and to me it still sounds too exotic. He also argued that consciousness does not follow an algorithm, so a computer cannot model it. With systems now approaching artificial general intelligence, that objection looks more and more wrong to me.