Quantum consciousness...

[I_am_not_mafia]

But those abilities and structures, whether you call them byproducts, emergent or accidental, are all retained because they confer an evolutionary advantage. So what evolutionary advantage is conferred by consciousness?

If by consciousness, you mean an organism's ability to interact with its environment, I'd argue that a QM particle very obviously has that: its resolved state is dependent on what happens outside itself, and QM experiments go to pretty elaborate lengths, actually, to attempt to confound it.

If by consciousness, you mean the capacity to experience qualia, we are completely agnostic on that with regard to evolution.  In order to demonstrate that something is an evolved trait, you have first to be able to demonstrate that it is a real property of organisms.  However, there are no fossils of qualia.  To talk about the evolution of consciousness, we'd have to develop a completely unprovable narrative, and I don't see how we could avoid begging the question in a particularly horrible way.

I mean neither of those things when I refer to consciousness. A non-conscious agent can still interact with an environment. And I would never define consciousness in undefinable terms such as qualia.

I would define consciousness in terms of its functionality. I can almost feel Khemikal reaching for this keyboard right now but it does aid agents in exploiting their environment. And as much as everyone here is quibbling about how I am phrasing things (advantage, functionality, higher etc) because you assume that I don't understand how evolution works (I do, better than both you and Khemikal), absolutely no one has yet answered the following:

What evidence or reason is there to assume that consciousness requires quantum effects in order to occur?

As far as I can see there is absolutely none and there is absolutely no reason to believe that we need quantum mechanics to create consciousness.