[floobynewb]

I think many people have a hunch in this direction. But that may just be because we desire ourselves to be in some way special. I would be wary of anyone discounting it out of hand. What you are really asking is how does the brain work? If you really want to think sensibly about this you are going to need to:

1) be prepared to spend decades thinking about it. 2) become really, really good at maths. 3) get really, really good at physics. 4) get really, really good at computational neuroscience

and if you actually want an answer, you have two options:

1) wait for a genius to work it out 2) become the genius who works it out

Hacker news is not going to be able to help you on this one!

[fdovila]

By the mean time, the rest of us, we can dig into Stuart A. Kauffman and Stuart Hameroff's ideas on Penrose's counciousness.

http://www.edge.org/memberbio/stuart_a_kauffman http://www.edge.org/conversation/five-problems-in-the-philos...

An updated critic on this ideas by Göran Wendin: http://online.kitp.ucsb.edu/online/qcontrol13/wendin/pdf/Wen...