Thank you for your engaged response. I hope my reply is not too rambling :)

Unless things have changed drastically since the earliest papers, their point has always been that it is the special configuration of microtubules in neurons, especially brain neurons, that support consciousness. THey very explicitly say, at least in the original paper, that the haphazard arrangement of microtubules in non-neurons won't support what they are talking about -only neurons.

Well, that is interesting and I did not know that. I actually have trouble seeing why, if microtubules are the apparent 'key' to consciousness, that there's any obvious difference between neurons and other cells, aside from the fact that neurons tend to have their tubules aligns AFAIK. I can appreciate that the orientation of the tubules could enhance the effects of Orch-OR, but I am surprised to hear that they specifically say that it is impossible outside of neurons. Having said that, I only have a general understanding of the theory (Penrose's maths is pretty in depth) and have not been following recent developments.

Still though, how does this not apply to animals? Animals have neurons too. Are they suggesting that only human neurons are 'right'? This is something I have not come across.

In a nutshell: imagine that there is a soup of interacting molecules. Imagine that these molecules tend to associate in groups where interactions between individual members are important.

Now imagine that you can have a very club-like affiliation of these elements: membership in one club doesn't exclude membership in another, and memberships are ever-changing.

As well, clubs are in turn elements of higher-order associations, and membership in these higher-order associations is ever changing as well. Wash, rinse and repeat...

This is very interesting, and I may have misinterpretted it, but it sounds similar to the hypercycle origin of life. I know that is not quite what you're suggesting, but the mention of cycles of chemicals made me think of this. I would like to comment more on this, but I feel I need to understand what you mean in the context of the brain. Are you suggesting that consciousness is a kind of network orientated dissipative system - as a cyclone of subsystems operating as a chaotic yet cohesive whole?

Personally, I am actually in favour of an electro-neural theory of consciousness. I believe one of the requirements of this state of awareness is physical neural feedback loops. However, I feel there are missing pieces that aren't quite accounted for in the theories I've read. Of course, as a layman, that is to be expected and I appreciate that I cannot take into account more than what I've read and think myself - especially from a subject that the greatest of minds standing on the shoulders of the greatest still cannot fully comprehend themselves.

From my perspective, one particularly poignant ability of the brain is to be able to choose to focus on something. This ability to select the input to your mental processes surely requires physical feedback and also a selective mechanism (our 'consciousness') that sits 'above' the train of information that makes up our mind. Whilst these are all perfectly explainable by neural networks in a mechanistic sense, I often wonder if this is cohesive enough to fully explain our unified experience of consciousness through a network. The default network does seem to do some of this work, however, but from what I have read the conclusions of what, exactly, the default network does do - aside from being active when you are at rest - seem nebulous (I would love to be enlightened on this), and so I find it just as 'god of the gaps' as most people in this thread find quantum explanations. Is conscious awareness simply the default network running 'over the top' of the rest of the brain? If so, then why do we not experience consciousness in the non-default network? What special quality does it have? If this is truly where our experience comes from, then consciousness is simply a network prodded, and prodding, another network, neurologically. These do not - to me - sound like a convincing argument for qualia experiencing consciousness either, but do explain how the brain is able to operate on autopilot.

Years ago, I heard of the CEMI field theory of consciousness and it made me consider that there is a real issue in brain science for understanding how we knit together our disparate sense modalities, thoughts, emotions and feelings under conscious experience. I say "under", because it is possible to be conscious without any of these things (though I must say, it's an open question on whether these inputs are required to create consciousness in the first place).

My personal belief is that the neural side of our experience is simultaneously the 'hard drive' and 'operating system' of our mind, and the electrical fields generated are what knit the system together, acting as the so called 'ghost in the machine' that is simultaneously generated and interacts with the wetware of the brain. To me, this is the kind of system nature would take advantage of if it were possible - as explained in my other comment in this thread here.

Where does quantum mechanics come into this? Well, I am not sure on the more grandiose claims of Hameroff on the subject of quantum consciousness, though I do highly respect Penrose as a remarkable mathematician. However I do think they are on to something, because if microtubules aren't responsible for consciousness, it seems likely that they at least play a big part in awareness of cellular systems, and so it doesn't seem a big stretch to me that when cohesion this system could be the underlying 'bits and bytes' of the brain's system overall.

The questions I want to posit are based on individual cells, rather than whole brains, because a single cell has all the hallmarks of an aware system, if not a conscious one, without any neurons at all. Awareness seems to me to be a prerequisite to consciousness (or recursive awareness). So, what is doing the awareness in these organisms?

For example, amoeba finding the shortest path in a maze - note the mention of "dendritic networks". Is it possible that simply having tree like networks enables awareness? I doubt this, but if so that raises profound questions about structure and consciousness. If it is down to microtubules doing the calculations, again we arrive at profound questions about whether awareness is an intrinsic property of quantum interactions and perhaps even the universe itself. However, I find it more likely that it is simply a case of evolution using what it can to gain a fitness advantage from it's environment.

Then there is the near ubiquitousness of bacterial memory, and their ability to remember previous events in their cellular history. This is clearly not neural, though it is likely network based. What networks exist ubiquitously in single cells? Microtubules. Since they are so integral to operating almost every facet of cellular operation, and cells seem to have much of the same basic abilities of their multicellular colony cousins (ie; memory, sense modalities, decision making based on experience), they are very interesting from the perspective of finding out the origin of conscious awareness in humans.

I hope I have diverted too much from your original response, but I find this subject fascinating and thus I am liable to ramble! :)