It seems to me that our consciousness is most likely an emergent property of neuronal activity. The thing with emergent properties is it's extremely hard to draw a line where the system that exhibits the property transitions from not exhibiting that property to exhibiting it.

Consider a cyclone, a mass of air rotating around a zone of low pressure in the atmosphere. Clearly this is an emergent property of air, or any gas really. But if you statistically analyse any mass of gas you will be able to find volumes where there are regions of lower pressure than the average and the particles nearby will have a (possibly tiny) net angular momentum around that low pressure region. Any volume of gas will have these, but are they cyclones? How long does such a state have to persist to count? How much angular momentum must be present? Must it be on the surface of the earth to count? What about near another similar surface?

You can do this with any emergent property, right down to the electrons orbiting a nucleus, does that make them cyclones? The thing is whether you say yes or not, it doesn't really matter because it's not a useful level of analysis if you want to understand the behaviour or nature of cyclones in global weather forecasting. It's a context error.

Take the idea that an electron's state is not random but chosen, per the article. Well to make a choice implies considering reasons or following a pattern of behaviour. However we can see experimentally that the states of electrons do strictly follow random statistical distributions. So you can argue that their 'nature' is to 'choose' a random state, but at this point youre jamming a useless and explanation-free definition on the term 'choose'.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm basically a materialist. I believe that my decisions as a free agent are determined by my mental, psychological and essentially neuronal state. I believe this is necessary for me to be considered to have free will, because for _me_ to have free will my decisions must come form me, and I am my state. If my memories, instincts, experiences, knowledge and values don't influence or even determine my decisions, then those decisions don't come from _me_ in any meaningful sense. I don't care if that means my decisions are in principle deterministic, that's fine, it just means I'm a consistent being.

So yes my behaviour comes from my state and you could argue that the behaviour of an electron comes from it's state, or the behaviour of a gas comes from it's state. All that means is that I'm made out of matter, but it's simply a useless level of analysis when considering consciousness, for exactly the same reasons that studying quantum mechanics and atomic motions isn't practically useful when looking at many other emergent properties of matter.

This article is like analysing an engine, reducing down the behaviour of the matter an engine is comprised of down to the fundamental particles the engine is composed of, then extrapolating that up to say that because Jupiter is made of those particles it must therefore be an engine. If you're going to say electrons are conscious, you have to also say they are cyclones, and engines, and economies, and thunder storms, and planets, and whatever else because if you take this mode of analysis as legitimate you can, without crossing any objectively clear boundary, reduce all emergent properties of matter down to the fundamental particles.