There remain many mysteries in the field of consciousness. 

An anesthesiologist and a Nobel Laureate physicist put their minds together to propose a new model they call Orchestrated Objective Reduction. That's often shortened to Orch OR.

Excerpt from my article on Consciousness in the Journal of the College of Syntonic Optometry:

Some current theories, such as the Orch OR model, also propose a connection between consciousness and quantum physics. The strength I see in this hypothesis is that it is the first model to propose enough loci of memory to account for a human lifetime of memories.

The locus of memory in this model is the microtubules. They attach to the cell membrane and define its shape, which changes when memories are formed. When memories or other functions are commonly lost following general anesthesia, there is a corresponding failure to restore the original shape of the cell membrane and its connections to the intracellular matrix of microtubules.

The weakness I see in the Orch OR model is what I see as hand waving to describe the initiation of a conscious event. The creators of the model, physicist Sir Roger Penrose and anesthesiologist Dr. Stuart Hameroff, propose that gravity causes a collapse of the quantum wave function, and this generates consciousness.

Would this imply that there should be less consciousness in space flight than in a submarine? If gravity were the motivating force for consciousness, why would anesthetics work if they don’t interfere with gravity?

Gravity is also the one force which current science fails to understand in a way that is consistent with Electromagnetism and quantum dynamics, and it is some 36 orders of magnitude weaker than Electromagnetism.

Since many saints have defied gravity when in a mystical or transcendent state of consciousness, I see that gravity is a function of consciousness rather than the reverse direction of causality.

In order for gravity to maintain stability in cosmic systems such as the solar system, it must travel at the speed of consciousness rather than the much slower speed of light which takes 7 minutes to traverse from the sun to the earth. Such a delay in the gravitational force would result in orbital instabilities.

Since condensates in their paramagnetic state are a significant presence in all cosmic entities, their consciousness of other entities in their proximity is anticipated in our model.

In this state of local consciousness, each proton is sees the other protons in its cosmic vicinity as an image within. There are as many Planck units within each proton as there are protons within its Hubble sphere, which is its visual field. Those that are closest have the most power to create an asymmetry in the internal representation, falling off with the inverse distance squared.

The same is true for electrical fields.

The interactions which have much greater long distance cosmic power are magnetic fields from linear Birkeland currents falling off at the inverse of the square root of distance. That is why galactic motion is best understood as a plasma. Rotating plasmas in a laboratory show identical movement when scaled to the size of the Milky Way galaxy. There is no need to visualize fictitious Dark Matter. [end of excerpt]

The Spirit Minerals, being condensates of the Transition Minerals, could be understood as a type of Dark Matter. It's just not the type the physicists are being paid to look for.