What is "understanding transcendently"? Just because Penrose is an authority on some subjects in theoretical physics doesn't mean he is a universal genius and that his ideas on consciousness or AI hold any value.
We gotta stop making infaillible super heroes/geniuses of people.
In this particular case, Penrose is a convinced dualist and his theories are unscientific. There are very good reasons to not be a dualist, a minority view in philosophy, which I would encourage anyone to seek if they want to better understand Penrose's position and where it came from.
He’s written and cowritten 5 books on the subject, going back nearly 40 years. I think he can as much as anyone can be considered an “authority” on something as inherently hard to observe or develop falsifiable theories as subjective conscious experience.
This isn’t an example of physicist stumbling into a new field for the first time and saying “oh that’s an easy problem. you just need to…”
The ideas of a very smart person who has spent decades thinking about a problem tend to be very valuable even if you don’t agree with them.
We gotta stop making infaillible super heroes/geniuses of people.
In this particular case, Penrose is a convinced dualist and his theories are unscientific. There are very good reasons to not be a dualist, a minority view in philosophy, which I would encourage anyone to seek if they want to better understand Penrose's position and where it came from.