[stared]

You are right that I shouldn't have put them in the same basket.

While Penrose's ideas on consciousness are not considered mainstream (neither by cognitive scientists nor quantum physicists), they don't fall in the infertile basket of:

- people gravitating to the state of science they were "raised into"

- people talking about things they are don't mastered

In this case it is a healthy scientific peculiarity. And who knows, it may turn out true. Or false, yet fertile. As ideas of faster-than-light communication with quantum states - which was flawed, yet gave birth to quantum information (more to this story, and an interesting overlap of non-science and science, in http://www.hippiessavedphysics.com/).