Someone who's thoughts I've been listening to for some time now is the cognitive scientist and AI researcher Joscha Bach. As far as I'm concerned he has the best model of our consciousness, life, the universe and maybe everything that I've come across. I've honestly been trying to find something substantial of his that I disagree with and I've come up short. His first Lex Fridman interview is a good start, and there's plenty of more technical talks out there too.

There's also Bret Victor who's "The Humane Representation of Thought" talk is one of my all time favourites. He hasn't seemed to be very active recently though.

I've come across Dave Ackley via Bach, and he has some really fascinating ideas about improving the nature of computing, seems to be a real outsider figure.

I'm sure there's many more brilliant and charasmatic folk out there, but we just haven't come across the the links to them yet.