If we're calling out names, what about Roger Penrose, John Searle, Stuart Hameroff, Hubert Dreyfus, Henry Stapp? These are very intelligent people and I suggest to get acquainted with their work. Neural scaling laws are real and no matter if you put into training 10e-8 petaFLOP/days of compute or 200000 petaFLOP/days you will hit irreducible error constant at Efficient Compute Frontier.

I'm not a functionalist and my belief is that AI — especially LLMs — will never achieve real understanding or consciousness, no matter how much we scale them. Language prediction is just a computation, but human thought is more than that.