It's anthropically necessary that the ontology of our universe permits consciousness, but selection just operates on state machines, and I would guess that self-consciousness is adaptive because of its functional implications. So this is like looking for an evolutionary explanation of why magnetite can become magnetized. Magnetite may be in the brain of birds because it helps them to navigate, and it helps them to navigate because it can be magnetized; but the reason that this substance can be magnetized has to do with physics, not evolution. Similarly, the alleged quantum locus may be there because it has a state-machine structure permitting reflective cognition, and it has that state-machine structure because it's conscious; but it's conscious because of some anthropically necessitated ontological traits of our universe, not because of its useful functions. Evolution elsewhere may have produced unconscious intelligences with brains that only perform classical computations.

Uploads are a distraction here. It's the study of the human brain itself which is relevant. I already claim that there is a contradiction between physical atomism and phenomenology, that a conscious experience is a unity which cannot plausibly be identified with the state of a vaguely bounded set of atoms. If you're a materialist who believes that the brain ultimately consists of trillions of simple particles, then I say that the best you can hope for, as an explanation of consciousness, is property dualism, based on some presently unknown criterion for saying exactly which atoms are part of the conscious experience and which ones aren't.

(I should emphasize that it would be literally nonsensical to say that a conscious experience is a physical part of the brain but that the boundaries of this part, the criteria for inclusion and exclusion at the atomic level, are vague. The only objectively vague things in the world are underspecified concepts, and consciousness isn't just a "concept", it's a fact.)

So instead I bet on a new physics where you can have complex "elementary" entities, and on the conscious mind being a single, but very complex, entity. This is why I talk about reconstructions of quantum mechanics in terms of tensor products of semilocalized Hilbert spaces of varying dimensionality, and so on. Therefore, the real test of these ideas will be whether they make sense biophysically. If they just don't, then the options are to try to make dualism work, or paranoid hypotheses like metaphysical idealism and the Cartesian demon. Or just to deny the existence and manifest character of consciousness; not an option for me, but evidently some people manage to do this.