>Personally I think consciousness, perception, and free will are a great unknown, and likely involve the makeup of the cosmos including quantum interactions.
You're taking a whole slew of things we're ignorant about, waving your hands and saying,"They must be related to some great truth hidden in particle physics!" I find this kind of thinking bizarre.
I think your discounting of such questioning and speculation is bizarre.
Consciousness is either entirely made up of "particle physics" or it is made from something even further into the field of speculation. Why would speculating about a connection between particle physics and consciousness be remotely "bizarre"? It seems quite likely to me that quantum mechanics is at least in some way involved in consciousness, given that that quantum physics governs the behavior of the matter of our brains.
It makes things seem obscure and that's where guys like Deepak Chopra come in.