Based on Tononi's earlier work on Integrated Information Theory, apparently, Maguire et al. have come up with a formulation of consciousness as a lossless integration of information that requires noncomputable functions, which implies that consciousness cannot be modeled computationally.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25560-sentient-robots-not-possible-if-you-do-the-maths.html
I'm personally skeptical of this, but their paper (seen here: http://arxiv.org/abs/1405.0126v1) has some impressive looking formal mathematical proofs that I will admit I lack the mathematical competence to judge the veracity of. Anyone with greater mathematical acumen want to take a look?
This is terrible even by New Scientist standards. I do wish they'd stop writing up random arXiv ramblings as if they'd even passed basic peer review. (Conference proceedings generally haven't.)
I'm not sure what conference proceedings you've been looking at, but the ones I've managed to publish in generally do have basic peer review (I know because I got comments back from the reviewers).
Though, whether or not the quality of peer review done by conferences is any good is another matter entirely.