...or maybe awareness is not so neatly divided between "conscious" and "unconscious," but is rather a continuum that increases in magnitude from the lowest level to the highest... So the first flickering of a choice occurs at a lower level before it becomes magnified by degrees into the higher level...

"To call Hammeroff and Penrose's position 'controversial' would be putting it nicely. I think the general consensus among both physicists and cognitive scientists is that these guys have gone off the deep end."

Yes, and I post the quote from my prof's book (Relativity and the Nature of Spacetime) once again on this forum, to emphasize that quantum laws apply only at the far microscopic quantum level, and manifest at middle and macro scales deterministically/linear-causally, as Bohr's correspondence principle states.

To imagine that brain activity, an activity of bodily organization at a non-quantum level, should somehow be exempt from this principle is to make an extraordinary claim, and as Carl Sagan said of such claims, requires extraordinary proof.

"The irrelevance of the quantum mechanical argument for the debate over the nature of spacetime is perhaps best seen from the fact that you are able to read this text. The equations of motion govern the behaviour of quantum objects at the microscopic level, where electrons, protons, neutrons, atoms. etc., live. All these entities act in accordance with the probabilistic laws of quantum mechanics. However, when the quantum mechanical equations of motion are applied at the macroscopic level, according to Bohr's correspondence principle, they should coincide with the classical equations of motion. In the case of spacetime this means that no matter how the constituents of the worldline of a given object behave - deterministically or probabilistically - it will not affect the shape of the worldline. To illustrate this situation better, consider the letters of the text you are reading. Each letter consists of billions of electrons, protons, etc., whose behaviour is probabilistic. If the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics were also manifested at the macroscopic level (the level of the letters on this page), then all letters would also behave in a probabilistic manner - constantly changing their shape and jumping around."

People are desperate to find loopholes for free will, time travel, whatever, in the quantum realm, forgetting that it applies only to quanta, not to objects at our scale and above. A particular particle (or sub-particle?) might go back in time, but an object made up of trillions of independently probabiliistic quanta probably (no pun intended) can't. Nor should activity arising from it (mental activity) logically be able to.

Perhaps there might another way for a consciousness to range freely in spacetime (at least within the finite worldline of its body), but not because of quantum probability.