I'm generally very skeptical of authors or papers that make claims about "quantum processes" and consciousness because they are generally written by people who know very little about neurology and even less about quantum physics. Ask them about quantum entanglement, and you'll generally get a misguided interpretation based on a decades old mistake in reasoning that has long since been corrected [1][2]. However, I decided to give this paper a try not because I expected there to be any actual content, but just to see why otherwise intelligent people would be drawn to what I consider to be obvious pseudoscience.

I didn't read the whole thing, but from what I know of quantum mechanics and QFT (standard undergraduate course load) I didn't see anything wildly misguided. This tells me that one of two things are true.

1. This paper describes a legitimate link between a non-classical process occurring in the brain that may "cause" consciousness. I do not know enough about the brain to rigorously evaluate the claims.

2 (more likely). Quantum physics is hard, even for scientists. Neither of the paper's author's are physicists, and neither have done any _recent_ meaningful work in any subfield of physics. I would expect that groundbreaking work in physics would require ideas beyond an undergraduate level, but I did not see any physics in the paper I didn't understand. It looks like at the very least, there is room for a false positive. What I mean by "false positive" is that sometimes not about A will cause you to reason that Q->C even when the truth is A->Q and A->C (correlation does not imply causation...). For example, it could be that the electrical signals of the brain that cause consciousnes + quantum effect, but if the same signals were running through a semiconductor we would instead see a different quantum effect (depletion zones, electron holes...). If our brains were made of 5nm CMOS transistors, a non-physicist might see quantum tunneling and conclude that it somehow caused consciousness.

I think the most important thing for non-physicists like me to remember about papers like this is that although sometimes scientists make important discoveries outside their fields we should allow specialists in the area to evaluate the non-physicists claims before believing them ourselves.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mysticism [2] http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/76036/how-does-qf...

EDIT

Penrose did important work on the nature of black holes ~40 years ago. At one point in time he was a real physicist.