(1) I believe we just said the same thing. I agree. The hard part to understand is this "we describe it that way, we live it this way."

I should hasten to add that there is a slight problem with what you've said, called the "preferred basis problem," but for reasons which I don't want to get into here, I suspect that the unitary part of QM is also able to handle this to some extent.

(2/3) Even if theories of free will were worn out in the 17th century, the feeling of free will is pretty hard to ignore; it's just this feeling that there are many options open, that you have a meaningful choice between many possible futures. It's the same thing with qualia. Sure, you can get a lot out of red by saying "color is a 3-tuple of integers, the red predicate holds when, after subtracting out a background tuple, the first integer is larger than the other two by a substantial degree." We render all sorts of red images this way, we can build computers which identify red things in photographs, and so forth. But that's nothing like how we experience redness, and it's extraordinarily hard to express what we experience in that vocabulary.

(4) I guess I'm getting at the fact that the rules for composing quantum systems are much more important than the nondeterminism. To the extent that a car has multiple functions, like the ability to play music and the ability to drive somewhere, we generally either split it up into components acting in parallel, or split it up into components which act in sequence. Similarly, our conscious experience has many perceptual functions, but our core consciousness itself does not seem to be divisible in that way.

It's like the old crap about the "inner theater": seeing something ends up "displaying it on your inner screen". The big problem with the inner theater is that I still have to put a unified you inside of it; it isn't sufficient to separate your senses into different theaters. The composition rules for neurons just don't seem to create the unified whole that we experience.

(5) That sounds to me like a cop-out. Sure, we've got two electrons and we can't tell which is which. But you'd need a much more radical application of quantum mechanics to say "therefore, there is only one electron, really." You would still seem to be confronted with the fact that there are two consciousnesses which you can't distinguish -- you would just have the added problem that you can't tell which was the "original" who you are "supposed" to destroy, and which was the "copy" who is permitted to live, because that's an arbitrary distinction. But it would seem pretty radical to say that, even for their first moments of life, there is one consciousness spanning two bodies such that killing one of those bodies does not amount to murder. Even though you can't tell these two apart, it would seem straightforward on most functional theories of mind to say that there are indeed two of them.

I agree with your summary in general -- I especially like one comment by Searle on free will: "Now, I dread saying this because, Searle's Third Law is, whenever philosophers talk about quantum mechanics, what comes out is hot air at best. And by the way, that applies to a lot of the things physicists say about quantum mechanics too."

But I was specifically answering the question, "why are some researchers so quick to blame our failure to understand consciousness on quantum mechanics when we don't yet understand the classical parts of the brain?" I wasn't being satirical. Some of these points come from other people; some of them come from me, but the aggregate point is that it's not just a "latest" flavor of warm and fuzzy: it's a flavor of warm and fuzzy uniquely suited to the problem and disproportionately confirmed by experiment to be a key part of the universe's workings. I agree that it's so hard to reason about and understand quantum mechanics that mechanical models are not just "actually making progress", but are much easier to grapple with and prove or disprove.

It's like if you ask me why us physicists ever accepted string theory, with its difficult mathematics and huge multiplicity of dimensions and arbitrary geometries over those dimensions. We've been interested in it because gravity just falls out. In quantum mechanics, some of the building blocks of warm-and-fuzzy consciousness also just fall out. The problems with both string theory and quantum consciousness are that the rest of the model is considerably more difficult, even though the hard problems of today just seem to have a promising solution in those terms.