Roger Penrose’s The Emperors New Mind proposed this in the 1990s. He gave circumstantial possibilities, and I don’t think we know more than that now.
As an amateur, my instinct is that the mystery of the observer "causing" wave function collapse is the best clue we have either way.
I wouldn’t be surprised if we are just weighted neurons, or if we do something quantum too. I doubt the something quantum will be the same as what our quantum computers do.
It's worth noting that it's not the observer causing anything, but a "technical observation" i.e. any interaction with the macroscopic environment; the analogy of "observer" leads to a misleading implication that there's something special if an agent or conscious entity is doing the observation, which it is not.
> Consciousness causing the wave-function to collapse isn't a very popular idea these days and there are alternative explanations, though as far as I know there isn't any evidence that it is involved or if it isn't. The wave function collapse happens regardless of whether a human or any conscious being is present, all that is needed is something does an observation. Imagine a scenario where a QM experiment is done, and the result is recorded by machines and stored as a data file. Let 100 years pass then distribute copies of the file to a million people. They will all see the same thing.
Actually I had just done a bunch of researching on Penrose around the time I was having that conversation with Jack, in fact I think I'd watched these two lectures within a few months of that conversation:
As an amateur, my instinct is that the mystery of the observer "causing" wave function collapse is the best clue we have either way.
I wouldn’t be surprised if we are just weighted neurons, or if we do something quantum too. I doubt the something quantum will be the same as what our quantum computers do.