I will have to look at this source. Of course, there is always Shadows and then Beyond the Doubting of a Shadow, by Penrose of course. I would be very grateful if anyone could find any proceedings from the debate that Daniel Dennett once had against Penrose.
Although I find the neural pathways of thinking to be interesting, I am more concerned with the logical soudness of the argument against mechanism itself. However, if it is true that this author has a good understanding of AI, this might be interesting. I am usually wary of people of the Church of AI.
What was interesting for me was to see a discussion of Penrose's argument on the FOM archives a few years ago, because normally mathematicians and computer scientists and philosophers don't just get together on a campus and talk about such matters.
It's a long time since Penrose wrote the book that inspired this group, and I have seen a lot of development of the ideas he looked at. Today I suddenly came across a book I bought perhaps 5 years ago that impressed me greatly at the time, "The Quantum Brain" by Jeffrey Satinover. Described by one reviewer as "the first great book of the 21st century" It is considerably broader and deeper than TENM in many respects, and a lot less dusty (in my opinion). If anyone has not read this book, I would recommend looking at a preview on Amazon and then snapping up one of the ludicrously cheap copies you can get from 3rd party sellers at the moment. Many of the chapters in this book are individually as enlightening as most other good books manage to be in their entirety, and it's a very enjoyable read as well (although there is plenty to strain the brains of even well-informed readers in there somewhere).
To readers of this group, some important issues are (in my opinion), the author has a much deeper and more up to date understanding of both neuroscience and artificial intelligence than Penrose, and is not so distracted by mathematics and the theory of computability. There are some very powerful "aha!" concepts that could change your view of the world completely. People interested in physics might like the very entertaining chapters on the long-running intellectual struggle between Einstein and the proponents of quantum theory, including the wrong turns that were taken and how they were resolved. Other topics that get involved are cellular automata, learning machines, a very subtle investigation of how the brain learns and its relationship to physical analogs (way beyond what I have seen elsewhere), quantum mechanics and how it is relevant to the brain and AI, and many more.