Other than popular science writers or physicists thinking they understand everything because they understand QCD, who said consciousness is stuck at a dead end for a lack of theories? The current standard hypothesis is that our synapse based computational network is more than sufficient to explain consciousness, we just don’t have the tools to prove or disprove the same. Connectomics research is still at its infancy unfortunately. Trying to invoke QC where we haven’t even gotten the bandwidth to prove or disprove a far simpler theory seems like a bad idea.
You're redefining consciousness here to mean physical awareness in the brain, though. That is not the same thing as conscious experience. Using the physical material of the brain at the electrochemical level to try to explain the hard problem of consciousness is a bit like trying to use the water cycle to explain the weak force in nuclear physics.
The only solutions which don't involve a fundamental reworking of physics basically end up denying that consciousness (as phenomenal experience) exists at all.
Looks like you invented your own problem and are now claiming physics cannot explain it as it exists today.
If there truly is something of “I feel it” factor that’s not just “physical” as you say it, then this can be disproven easily by seeing if a machine can attain consciousness. If that never happens then good for your theory. If it happens at some point then you’re wrong. Until then it seems like a fairly non scientific philosophical argument at best. I.e., it’s still worth having but let’s not try claiming your microtubules are tingling the quantum realm to make you think shall we?
I'm afraid there's nothing special about a machine attaining consciousness. Many of the approaches to the hard problem would happily work with conscious machines. This may not be a question for science at all.
> The current standard hypothesis is that our synapse based computational network is more than sufficient to explain consciousness.
This is "strong reductionism" which comes under the heading of "Rejection of the Problem" in the linked article. GP is essentially denying that the hard problem exists.
What I mean to say is that the author subscribes to a theory of consciousness "strong reductionism" which redefines it to mean "things we can observe", in as much as it states that it solves for all thing which 'need to be explained'.
1. Consciousness is the activity of the brain in response to stimulae, or things that people report that they can experience. These are the only things which need to be explained.
2. We can measure these and explain them with reductive science.
3. Therefore we can explain consciousness.
But of course this is a redefinition of consciousness because it ignores phenomenology. And that also needs to be explained.
>> That's very surprising to me, because Deutsch is heavily in the Everett interpretation branch of possible quantum interpretations (pun intended).
He considers a working QC as basically an experimental confirmation of the many-worlds interpretation.
Something like: "So tell me, these amazing parallel computations - where exactly do you say that they are being computed again if not in the parallel worlds?"
There is a nice interview with him in Wired that touches this briefly:
"So what prompted you to start thinking about quantum computing?"
My take is that for him the QC started as a thought experiment to get a quantum observer to sidestep the whole wavefunction collapse by a classical observer problem.
