On a philosophical level, as far as I am concerned, the philosopher David Chalmers has PROVED beyond a shadow of a doubt that mental process can never be be reduced to mere neurological process. On the other hand, the rough correlations between brain process and mental activity, even if they don't prove cause-effect, are indisputable and suggestive--even when there's the suggestion that the cause runs from mind to brain.
An anesthesiologist named Stuart Hameroff has proposed that consciousness is seated in the microtubles of the brain--(whatever they are, they are not neurons), and that consciousness arises as a result of quantum activity in said microtubules. He invokes the notion of nonlocal quantum entanglement to explain the whole range of subtle psi phenomena. Hameroff's ideas carry a great deal of weight for me because he is supported by the British mathematician Roger Penrose, who is, as they say in California, One Real Smart Dude.
Hameroff also explicitly invokes Alfred North Whitehead's notions of panpsychism, which to me is philosophically convincing, but the very nature of which is something that perhaps can never be established by empirical scientific methods*
In all fairness, Powell discusses Hameroff's ideas and several others of interest, and it is always encouraging to find someone from the relatively hard sciences, a psychiatrist and neurologist, no less, who is willing to go outside the box on these matters.
But Hameroff's ideas, however interesting, are still subject to Chalmer's critique of physicalist reductionism.
*Unless it is possible to establish valid criteria for evaluating mental phenomena as empirical--whatever the hell that means.
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