I have explored many theories and worldviews in my life, but some loom larger than others. I found enough of merit in Hameroff and Penrose's quantum mind theory that I spent a year working with Hameroff. I've been a fellow traveler and sympathizer of Eliezer ever since he first showed up as an AI-focused transhumanist in the 1990s. And what I've discovered in the past few months is that Eric Weinstein's theory of everything ("geometric unity") has enormously more substance than you might guess, from its critics or its defenders on social media. 

It bears comparison with string theory. String theory is this extraordinary generalization of quantum field theory that was discovered incrementally, which seems to be mathematically coherent, and which describes a zillion possible worlds, one of which may be our own. Geometric unity is more like a proposal that a specific highly unique quantum field theory exists, and that we inhabit one of its solutions. The jury is still out on whether the theory in question can exist mathematically; if it does, it's one of those intricate unique mathematical objects like the Monster Group. (The Muskian dictum that "the most entertaining outcome is the most likely" suggests that if it exists, it does so as a vacuum of string theory, which is not impossible.) 

The amusing auxiliary realization I've just had, is that in principle one could combine all three of these paradigms as one's personal worldview. Weinstein's theory would be the fundamental physical theory, Hameroff and Penrose's "orchestrated objective reduction" would be the theory of how consciousness relates to physical reality... and what would be the Yudkowskyan component? It would be, not just ideas like dangerous superintelligence and coherent extrapolated volition, but the entire cosmological conception of acausal trade across a multiverse dominated by locally hegemonic superintelligences, most of whom pursue deeply nonhuman value systems like "squiggle maximization". 

Even worse, it would be possible to dub this combined Weinstein-Hameroff-Yudkowsky theory as "WHY Theory" (I imagine the "why?" spoken in the plaintive tones of a normie debunker, facing yet another challenge to their sanity), and turn it into a recognizable brand in the contrarian-intellectual social-media space. The reason it could go far is precisely because each component really does target a blind spot in human knowledge (fundamental physics, nature of consciousness, destiny of intelligence in the universe), and provides a concrete answer that has more substance and logic, than academic defenders of normalcy are comfortable with acknowledging. I think the unsuspecting co-founders of WHY Theory also might not be entirely comfortable with this imposed intellectual cohabitation, but that's what happens when you put ideas out there and they take on a life of their own. 

Stepping back from this scenario, my own opinions are as follows. I still bet on string theory, but Weinstein's theory has some chance (in the sense of logical uncertainty) of existing mathematically and of describing the physics of our world, and it corresponds to a genuine gap in the range of possibilities that have been rigorously explored by mathematical physicists. The same goes for the combination of Penrose's noncomputable physics and Hameroff's quantum cognition in the microtubules; furthermore, I deem the involvement of entanglement in conscious cognition likely for ontological reasons, and the microtubules of the axon are still the best proposal I know for where that might be happening. Finally, I am a skeptic of acausal trade (because of epistemic barriers) and of light-cone-conquering superintelligences (because of the doomsday argument), but I see the internal logic of both ideas, and don't consider them easily falsified.