Ok, that's a start, thanks. So is he suggesting that the way consciousness carves reality at the joints is special?
...in which case, this carving must be done at the analysis stage, right, not at the perception stage? Because at the perception stage, our senses work just like other (non-conscious) sensors.
And then finally, if he is talking about the way the conscious mind carves reality at the joints, this is processing after we have all the data so why is quantum mechanics relevant? (I imagine that a creature could analyze sensory data in lots of different ways, for example a bee might use Fourier analysis for all I know, where we might use some sort of object identification criteria…)
It's fine if you don't know the answers to these questions, or they are too wrong to respond to.
Another way of asking my question is, since we evolved from non-conscious creatures, and the hardware is largely the same, where does using the wave function to carve reality at the joints come in?
He's trying to find the joints that you have to carve in quantum mechanical systems so that you can find any consciousnesses that happen to be in them.
So yes, it's entirely in the analysis stage - finding how to describe in quantum mechanical terms those things we already know how to describe in informal language, like 'person' or 'choice' or 'memory'.
Max Tegmark publishes a preprint of a paper arguing from physical principles that consciousness is “what information processing feels like from the inside,” a position I've previously articulated on lesswrong. It's a very physics-rich paper, but here's the most accessable description I was able to find within it:
The whole paper is very rich, and worth a read.