No.
Perception->Visual perception->Ontology of visual perception and consciousness->Quantum physics->No.
edit: Actually, when i think about it, there's something analogous to Goodwin's law in papers/articles about the mind and consciousness. Whenever quantum physics becomes a topic the whole article just unravels into nonsense. This is of course obvious to anyone who've studied the physical properties of the mind (We don't even understand how whole braincells work together to form mental phenomena and conscious thought, so anything on a sub-atomic level is just out on a bike-ride (Norwegian idiom, sorry)).
What you say, however, is dogmatic. You assume the emergentist theory of consciousness: that consciousness somehow emerges from the complex physical interactions in the brain. This theory is itself woo at the moment, because there is not even a proposed mechanism by how this could happen. There is just a magic step: complexity -> magic -> consciousness.
It makes all the sense to take into account the additional information about reality that quantum mechanics provides when trying to understand consciousness, which is so far a mysterious aspect of reality.
So it's either emergentism or woo, by my reckoning. YMMV.
I think you're being too quick. Let's think about things that we know to be emergent structures/behaviors: cities, societies, the human body, ecosystems, etc. In all of them, you can recognize that the network of interactions is too complex for human intelligence to fully grasp, but you can pin-point the building blocks. It's not magic. We know how DNA directs the synthesis of proteins, how proteins fold, how they combine to form larger structures, etc. It's not possible to fully grasp the full mechanism that is a human body, or a society, but this is because it's too complicated, not because we don't know the components.
With conscious we don't have that. It's an all-or-nothing proposition. What is your consciousness made of? Can you identify building blocks? If not, then you just have faith in emergentism, but you don't have a serious scientific theory.
If eventually you can identify building blocks, and emergentism is correct, then surely these parts will belong to smaller chunks of the system. Eventually neurons are part-conscious. Otherwise how could the big thing emerge? So, in this case, there is something fundamental about matter that we know nothing about.
Or, consciousness is more fundamental than mater. Serious people have also proposed this throughout the ages -- call it platonism maybe. This is an unfashionable philosophical position theses days, but as valid as materialism. Both are perfectly compatible with current scientific theories.
Some people actually believe that all mater is conscious -- this position is referred to as panpsychism. Some people believe they are the only conscious entity in the universe -- this is solipsism.
These positions may sound absurd, but they are not more or less scientifically credible than the mainstream one. They all fit the observable reality, and none of them can be tested.
We all have our intuitions and personal beliefs, but from a scientific standpoint I think that the only rigorous attitude is to remain agnostic on this. Otherwise we fall into the same intellectual traps as mysticism. The scientific attitude is above all to doubt, not to blindly believe.
Falsifiability doesn't apply to essentially any metaphysics, anyway. Which is where all the woo about panpsychism and morphic resonance and whole series of theories that make consciousness into some weird thing outside our universe.
The question is what metatheories are _compatible with observation_, or at the least, under _what level of gymnastics_ they are.
All this talk about "we don't know what consciousness is; therefore XYZ" is filled with woo.
Even if we don't know what conscious is or can't exactly _test_ for it, most people agree there are at least different levels of sophistication of consciousness, and that some animals appear to be at least partially conscious. That's not odd if we explain this in relation to brain capacity and along normal evolutionary lines. Is it anything other than the evolution of brains really necessary to explain consciousness? Why do you believe so?
So what new dimensions of reality would you like to request in order to explain consciousness? Does anyone have any evidence these other dimensions exist? No, of course they don't.
I think consciousness is an intrinsic aspect of the Universe, which seems to be fundamentally made of it and something we can call the flux which is everything else. The flux has pattern/form and is constantly changing apparently in accord with rules, some of which we seem to grasp quite well. Consciousness, on the other hand, has no properties and does not exist in time, it is always now. In fact the only way we know about consciousness (and give talk of it any heed whatsoever) is that we are consciousness. We often forget this due to the distraction of currently occupying a body (a self-referential "whirlpool" of flux that includes an apparatus for interfacing with consciousness in a way that is as yet entirely mysterious to science) but that soon solves itself in the fullness of time. But let that pass.
More interesting from the point of view of this thread is the way that a human mind arises from the mind of the body's cells, if you credit that they are sentient themselves. It also points to the larger multi-human sentient entities which we can and do comprise.
OK, I'll bite: Just what makes you believe that? What evidence convinces you this is true?
I have, myself, had some experiences that seem to me to have something to do with some of the statements I sometimes make about "consciousness".
But there is no way to share that experience with you, no symbols I can transmit. There is no consciousness-o-meter (except for consciousness itself maybe.)
For what it's worth, I consider consciousness to be a capability, like the ability to digest cellulose or to echolocate; and I consider it to exist on a continuum, with us humid beings being the most capable (that we know of) and unicellular microbes arguably the least. And the degree of capability looks to be strongly related to the complexity of a living being's brain (or what passes for it - microbes cogitate, in a very dim but adequate-to-their-needs way by discharging and detecting chemicals in their protoplasm). From all the examples we're aware of, it appears that consciousness is a process, what brains do, kinda like a flame is what a candle does.
We've only ever (reliably) observed the phenomena we associate with consciousness in living brains. If we work hard enough at mimicking brains in silicon, we may one day see consciousness in man-made machines. I, at least, have a lot of trouble imagining that consciousness can arise independently of structures painstakingly evolved in that direction or even more painstakingly constructed. Humans pay a huge price for their capable brains - the difficulty and risk of childbirth, the prodigous consumption of (I think) one-fifth of the body's energy. If consciousness were something lying around elsewhere, evolution would not have needed to take this costly route.
That's me, science and reason talking. Of course there's always a possibility we're surprisingly wrong about this.
I definitely agree with most of what you've said above, with the main exception that I consider consciousness to be somehow intrinsic or primary to the Universe, even more so than matter/energy and space/time, rather than something that emerges over time.
I do agree that what I would call the capability to express consciousness seems to exist on a continuum, and I agree with your characterization of it, but I believe that what we consider "inanimate" objects express consciousness too. At the risk of sounding completely looney, I'll admit that I've had encounters that make me think that whirlwinds ("dust devils") have or express a kind of sentience!
Although I can't really explain it, experimenting with robotics and augmentation has made me realize (or so I believe) that the interface between our bodies and our experience of our bodies is fundamentally mysterious, that there can be no possible way that any constellation of matter and energy could cause or engender the subjective sense of self. Anyone who has blinked their eyes knows that there is some connection between them and the experience of seeing, but how you see is totally mysterious. A sentient machine would be in the same perplexing situation.
I agree that emergence-flavoured theories of consciousness are essentially woo woo, or non-explanations. I am therefore not very exited about massive statistical simulations trying to achieve intelligence, because even if Watson were to become self aware after stuffing it with even more megahertz, we would just have another "brain" on our hands and we will have nothing but the turing test to discern its "brain-ness". That is to say - I am exited, because Watson is really cool and useful, but not exited about what neural nets, genetic algorithms or statistical data analysis will tell us about consciousness.