All cellular and neural communication in the body occurs via microtubules. This constant electrochemical dynamical activity creates a “field” in and around the body.
I’m sure you have heard of "kirlian photography"that records the EM field an organism creates in and around itself?
This field is invisible to the unaided eye but it exists as a field regardless of an observer.
Now imagine this field inside our brain created by our microtubule network and then think of a concept like ORCH OR (orchestrated objective reduction) at the qantum level that might create a conscious experience of such an orchestrated field in our “inner mind”.
In one of the Youtube discussions, Roger Penrose made a comment that made me sit back and try to visualize what this nobel laureate implied with that statement.
Penrose turned the conscious observer around. Instead of consciousness causing collapse, wavefunctions collapse spontaneously, causing a moment – a ‘quantum – of consciousness.
Consciousness and the collapse of the wavefunction
It is becoming apparent that consciousness may occur in single brain neurons extending upward into networks of neurons, but also downward and deeper, to terahertz quantum optical processes, e.g. ‘superradiance’ in microtubules, and further still to fundamental spacetime geometry (Figure 1).
I agree that consciousness is fundamental, and concur with Roger Penrose that it involves self-collapse of the quantum wavefunction, a rippling in the fine scale structure of the universe.
Organic light per se isn’t consciousness. But organic light could be the interface between the brain and conscious processes in the fine scale structure of the universe.
Figure 1. A scale-invariant hierarchy extending downward from a cortical pyramidal neuron (left) into microtubules, tubulin dipoles, organic ring dipoles and spacetime geometry curvatures. Self-similar dynamics recur every three orders of magnitude.
Consciousness is the collapse of the wavefunction | Stuart Hameroff
Quantum mechanics suggests that particles can be in a state of superposition - in two states at the same time - until a measurement take place. Only then does the wavefunction describing the particle collapses into one of the two states. According to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum…
This really belongs in the “microtubule” thread, but this is not just restricted to the human brain but is present in ALL eukaryotic organisms that ever lived .
Proto tubulin filaments can even be found in prokaryotic organisms
Every cell of every living organism on earth contains microtubules. If microtubules do function at the quantum level it would explain all naturally occurring response mechanisms in every living thing on earth, regardless of brain or neural network!