Roger Penrose is a brilliant thinker with unusual takes on consciousness and artificial intelligence. These notes come from a Lex Fridman interview on the computability of consciousness and from the book below.
On physics, Penrose says in that interview that Paul Dirac tacitly treated quantum mechanics as a provisional theory: we still lack a theory of the collapse of the wave function, physics is essentially stuck, and quantum mechanics has to be modified even-handedly to include gravity rather than gravity simply being quantized.
On consciousness, he names three aspects, intelligence, awareness, and understanding, and finds the most approachable entry point in anesthesia, where we do know how consciousness can be turned off. His primary insights seem to start there.
In The Emperor’s New Mind he proposed that consciousness originates at the quantum level inside neurons. He admits the idea is speculative, and to me it still sounds too exotic. He also argued that consciousness is non-algorithmic and so cannot be modeled by a computer. With systems now approaching artificial general intelligence, that objection looks increasingly wrong to me.