And believe me, it's sad to see one of our great minds turn into a nut.
I minored in physics at Penn State in the late 90s when he was at the Penn State Institute for Gravitation and the Cosmos at Penn State, so I actually attended some of the original lectures he gave on QM. It was just as nutty back then. He basically dreamed up an entirely new particle that didn't exist in the standard model and which had never been detected and then postulated it interacted with microtubules in some unknown way to cause some unknown effect and *MAGIC* consciousness happens.
Even though it was known at the time that's not what microtubules do and that there's no way a neuron could maintain quantum decoherence long enough for it to have any effect on its synaptic function.
It is and always was a bunch of wishful thinking because Penrose personally couldn't deal with the idea free-will may be an illusion.