Well, if you want to dive right in, you could read this book by David Chalmers, who is (or at least was when I actively studied such things) the most famous philosopher who has grappled with the "hard problem" of consciousness:

https://www.amazon.com/Character-Consciousness-Philosophy-Mi...

There are a bunch of books and published papers on the topic, of course. But most of them, including the book listed above, would be a slog if you're not taking a philosophy class on the subject. Even then, they'd likely be a slog. Philosophy arguments on this topic can quickly become extremely intricate, and laden with jargon.

I've written a number of papers on the topic myself for classes, but don't recall if any of them are accessible to someone with no prior knowledge of the debate. There might be a decent one that I wrote for Douglas Hofstadter when he was a visiting professor at MIT. I can check and send you a copy if it seems like it might be approachable.

As for a correlation between consciousness and quantum mechanics, that's not really something I buy into. The famous physicist Roger Penrose, however, wrote a couple of books arguing that computers can never be intelligent because the human brain does special quantum mechanics stuff. If you ask me, his ideas about this are a bunch of claptrap. But in case you are interested, here is one of them:

https://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-Universe-Quantum-Physic...