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I think your high school physics class left out some important details about quantum mechanics. The point of the two slit experiment is that you're not just doing it with solid particles, like water... that would be a classical wave. It also works with photons, which have no mass and can travel through a vacuum like a bullet. It even works with just one photon at a time. You can see them arrive at the target with a detector, individually, and if you set it up right they'll still follow the same interference pattern of a wave, even though there's nothing for them to "wave" through. The famous Michelson-Morely experiment proved that there's no medium to carry light. It's a strange result that really does require quantum physics to explain- you can't explain it with just classical physics.
When you say:
That's a very old argument, but this point pretty much disproven unless you allow for some even stranger results (like waves travelling backwards in time levels of weird). People have been trying to knock down the standard model of QM for a long time now, but it just keeps giving correct results... at this point you kinda have to accept that it has some truth to it, even if the math looks odd.
I do agree that there's a lot of cranks and grifters using the word "quantum" to sell nonsense, and that's really a problem. It's unfortunate that Penrose (who really is a respected scientist) gave them cover by writing a book that seems to agree with their woo. On the plus side, his book forces you to wade through like 400 pages of dense math about regular physics before it gets to the woo stuff, so I think most cranks wouldn't make it that far. He's also upfront that he's just offering some speculation about consciousness, not any sort of proof.
He paired up with a professional neuroscientist to develop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reduction. It's still speculative, but it's a lot more detailed than just "hey dude whatever the brain is, like, quantum..." They've done recent experiments showing there really are some strange effects going on in the brain in ways that you'd normally see in quantum mechanics, not classical. EG absorbing light more slowly than would normally be possible, and than re-emitting it in a higher intensity than normal.
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