Thanks Michael We’re not necessarily disagreeing. Membranes by themselves can generate field patterns, e.g. via interference. If you squeeze axoplasm out of an axon, like toothpaste from a tube, and replace with saline, the axon still fires due to membrane ion channels. But I don’t think axonal firings are conscious. They’re not affected by anesthesia. Consciousness happens collectively at end integration (end orchestration) in somatic microtubules and triggers firings. There’s more fine scale quantum processes involved at higher frequencies. Those are probably generating patterns and fields at finer scale, and holographically. We know megahertz and gigahertz can regulate axonal firings, so they may be at play in embryogenesis. A deeper level. Maybe conscious. Have you looked for megahertz in endogenous patterns?

There is nothing in the universe that is non-physical. Even concepts and thoughts are electromagnetic field interactions and chemical pumps and ion flows. What we call 'the abstract' are patterns that describe the consistent and relevant system dynamics of a thing as it relates to our intentions, but these always have a physical implementation. So what is abstraction then? It means there is some mapping between the electro-chemical interactions in my head, to whatever physical dynamics in some thing, to the electro-chemical interactions in some other persons head. That's really the premise of language to begin with, that two people can have the same idea in their head and this idea consistently refers to some external phenomenon. Which neurons fire up and the pattern connectivity in each persons brain is wildly different, but, so long as the reference is consistent its all good. None of this is interesting or useful imo.

Any theory of consciousness should account for qualia, the subjective "what it's like" qualities of experience, as this addresses the core of the "hard problem" of consciousness … why do physical processes give rise to these subjective, first-person phenomena at all?

I think human and octopus consciousness would have some common features as both are based on microtubules in my view. AI consciousness based on computation is fantasy I think. I do agree panpychism is not useful. Consciousness is a process, sequences of collapses of the wavefunction. What is needed is quantum pan-protopsychism. Panpsychism has the combination problem and epiphenomenalism problem, easily addressed by quantum pan-protopsychism. See Mike Wiest article in Neuroscience of Consciousness academic.oup.com/nc/article/…

(1) Software is abstract and immaterial. (2) Hardware is physical; material. (3) Software and hardware causally interact. (4) [left as an exercise to the reader]

Visual representation of Schrödinger wave equation.

Consciousness is not an epiphenomenon—it performs real work. It enables coordination across brain regions that would otherwise remain isolated, creating a unified cognitive moment.

Mathematics seems like the container for all that is possible, but there is no single 'self-consistent' mathematical universe, rather it describes all possible universes and all possible configuration of their laws, principles, and physics. Computation on the other hand is some universal translatable process. If something is computable, it can be computed by anything that computes. Computability is like the minimum feature set of a mathematically possible universe to process information. Thoughts might be the representational correlate of some physical process, but they don't seem confined to a single mathematical universe or coherent representational language. Dreaming seems like an alternate reality that obeys a different physical rule-set and causal logic that nonetheless helps accelerate learning for our waking lives. The mind seems to wander across possible mathematical universes, borrowing from different ones to carry out different kinds of information processing tasks.