Consciousness and Quantum Physics

Anaesthetics turn off consciousness. Studies have shown that the anaesthetics that effect consciousness also effect quantum energy flow in microtubules. 

"Here, we show anesthetic molecules can impair π-resonance energy transfer and exciton hopping in tubulin quantum channels, and thus account for selective action of anesthetics on consciousness and memory." https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25714379/

More general account: 

https://futurism.com/human-consciousness-quantum-physics

Comment:

Not sure I ever made the connection but SRH (search blog) says that consciousness cannot be a part of thinking or cognitive brain function.

We are aware of our thoughts. We know what we are thinking. If consciousness was derived from cognition we could end up in the situation where we are conscious of consciousness. And that opens up a paradox (which SRH hypothesis suggests generally accompanies all self reference) in this case of being conscious of unconsciousness. That is conscious of consciousness and then just negate the second part. The standard form of paradox from Russel's paradox to Godel to Turing Halting. Or put that another way. Use self-reference to map an entity into itself and then negate thus creating the standard "This is false" paradox. SRH stems from this seeming to be possible in "every" case where self-reference is sufficiently powerful to create a mapping of self into self. This led to interest in fixed-points as mapping self into self must have a fixed point that is invariant under the transformation. Very loosely is this the experience of self? But a fixed point it was hypothesises is the target object for paradox. All very lose over view never formalised. Fear is that a formal version of SRH will have sufficient self-reference to create contradiction and so must be impossible. Indeed if SRH is as powerful as it wants to be it must also be impossible! That's what you get for trying to show that self-reference is paradoxical. The only way to do that successfully would need to be non-self referential for starters. 

Anyway I used to think "self consciousness" was conscious of conscious. I am a conscious being, so being conscious of myself must be conscious of consciousness. That experience of consciousness, of knowing about yourself and the world as it happens, it is tempting to associate with self-consciousness. I am seeing the world, and I know that I am seeing the world. This leads many Daniel Dennett especially, but also my younger self, to think consciousness arises from some "feedback" in the brain. Not only am I knowing, but I am feeding information back round the system to know that I am knowing.

In my own history this led to AIME and a very primitive attempt to program this. It was a program that pattern matched. And then I intended to map its state into a 2D pattern isomorphic with the state and feed it into itself. Consciousness might arise was my inspiration. But I remember realising on the toilet one day that the patterns such a system would create would become meaningless to the outside world. To understand what the pattern meant you would need to be AIME!! Such solipsism is meaningless. It proved to me it was a pointless endeavour and I abandoned it.

I discovered later that AIME's patterns would have been fractal and would have some meaning to the outside world. But not to AIME she wasn't a general enough AI to understand fractals.

So quickly we can abandon this idea of feedback making meaning and consciousness.

Consciousness must lie OUTSIDE everything it is conscious of!

So quantum world is a great place to have consciousness because we are not conscious of this!