Energy harvesting by photosynthesis in “brainless” plants and green algae is identified as the root non-trivially quantum process powering neural correlates of consciousness in humans and other “brainy” animals. Thermofield attributes of solar energy flow through the biosphere’s food chain are suggested as a “bottom up” mediator between quantum-coherent aspects of photosynthesis and emergent dynamical architectonics of transmembrane electrical potentials in neurons. This quantum-ecological approach to energetics of brain function as part of an open dissipative world system offers a segue, experimentally grounded by empirical evidence for photosynthetic coherence, into qualitatively gauged links between quantum tunneling and the Hard Problem of consciousness.

anthropic, coherence, chlorophyll, dissipative, entanglement, Explanatory Gap, food chain, Fourier duality, fractal, Hard Problem, Heisenberg, observable, photosynthesis, q-boson, qualia, thermofield, transmembrane, tunneling, Z-process