Interesting point. Could you recommend something to read about this topic, or maybe you have some writeups of your own? Mainly interested about the correlation between quantum mechanics and the problem of consciousness.
> Could you recommend something to read about this topic
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:
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:
I am not an expert in either of these fields, but I wouldn’t dismiss the correlation. Quantum mechanics tackles the problem of the observer. If you put a cat in a box, it’s in an undefined state until someone looks at it. If you send your friend over to check the cat, he sees the cat but to you it’s still in an undefined state. Now the friend comes back and tells you the information about the cat, and suddenly your conciousness has indirectly “resolved” the state of the cat. You can extrapolate this to all events in the universe, basically when your consciousness came into existence you have resolved the entire history of the universe.
The "interpretation" that you are using of QM is just one of many proposed interpretations. Specifically, you are referring to an interpretation called the "Von Neumann–Wigner interpretation". It's not an interpretation that I buy into.
The only interpretations that really make sense to me are objective collapse theories and the Many Worlds interpretation. For neither of these interpretations does human consciousness cause wave function collapse.
If you want to know more about the various interpretations of QM, there's a Wikipedia page on them here:
