their problem is … [several items omitted] … they can always talk a friend into wiring them another $100,000
Assuming you’re correct about that, I would love an explanation of how they come to have this enviable problem. Is it primarily a matter of social class, or is there some more specific category of origin which produces people who can’t invest or run a business, but never run out of opportunities to keep trying?
Visit his blog and you’ll find he has genuine paranoid delusions (he claims to be “Q from the Qanon movement” and has a post about his ex-wife’s conspiracies against him)
Sounds like a job for RationalWiki
There’s a bit more to Penrose’s ideas than that.
For example, his version of gravity-driven wavefunction collapse was motivated by Hawking’s argument for information loss in black hole evaporation. In the era of string theory, it seems a majority of quantum gravity theorists think that information is conserved, but back in the day Hawking’s position was a serious one, and Penrose had the ingenious idea that information gain in wavefunction collapse could in some sense balance information loss in quantum gravity, for a net conservation of phase space volume.
Another example - that a quantum-gravitational process could be noncomputable - actually makes sense, since the path integral involves 4-manifolds and some properties of 4-manifolds are actually undecidable. I agree that there’s something wrong with his argument that metamathematical thought must supervene on some kind of trans-Turing computation, since it rests on humans having unlimited metamathematical knowledge rather than just belief. But you can’t really hope to disentangle all the issues here without having some theory of intentionality and how material states even manage to be about anything, and he doesn’t go there.
As for the microtubules, neuronal microtubules do have some distinctive properties, e.g. they line up with the axon. It’s tempting to suppose that there’s an electromagnetic interaction between the membrane action potential and electronic states in the microtubule. There are a handful of people who work on topics like this, but it would be enormously difficult to demonstrate such an interaction, if the debate over quantum speedups in photosynthesis is any guide.
Fashionable biophysical speculation seems to have moved on to the ideas of Karl Friston and Michael Levin, but I still esteem Penrose’s speculations. I sometimes think of it as a science-fictional anticipation of what the actual truth will be, the way that Einstein worked on a unified field theory a few decades before the mainstream started talking about a theory of everything.
I’ve been on their online forums, but I have literally zero experience of the Bay Area rationalist scene or any other. Of course I know about the billionaires, but I thought the answer was going to be that the rationalists come from wealthy families and social circles.