It does not purport to be science; not really. It's supposition. That is not a knock against it.

The existence and nature of consciousness, and its relationship to the computing and (perhaps) learning systems we now build, is a big open question, and the single biggest gaping hole in our knowledge about the world. It seems likely that filling that gap will require conceptual frameworks for thinking about consciousness far outside of the ones we've had up to this point -- they have failed for thousands of years.

The goal of the article is not to present fact put to provide a tentative exploration of the space of possible explanations of something we simply do not understand at all.