"It posits a kind of dualism, in which our physical brains are manipulating our nonphysical Observers, but provides no insight into how they do this manipulating"

I’ve read this after Andres recommended it and it’s great—i especially liked its intent and the epistemic humility—but like Andres says there are some inconsistent bits. The things i personally found inconsistent are your dualistic take on Andres’s views and your assumption of not being any hypothesis for how consciousness might interact with the body.

Andres explicitly thinks that our conscious experience plays out in the dynamics of the brain’s electromagnetic field—it is the EM field! Like Bertrand Russell said, our naive powers of observation as well as our rigorous scientific observations only present us with the behavior of physical stuff, they never present us with the intrinsic nature of physical stuff. The more we peer into the nature of physical objects via scientific experiment the more it disappears into a cloud of relations. Nobody ever said what an electron, neutron or gluon were in themselves. We only know them in terms of how they interact (or not) with other particles. Scientists regard these particles as excitations of quantum fields, each particle being an excitation of a separate field (well not for the Z & W bosons which are separate types of excitations in the same field), but this doesn’t tell you anything of their inner nature either. So what some people like Russell & Eddington are saying is: we know there’s stuff out there we call “physical stuff” but we don’t know its intrinsic nature, and we know there’s stuff in our minds we call “consciousness” which is our intrinsic nature, so why would it be so wrong to hypothesize that the intrinsic nature of the physical stuff is the same with our intrinsic nature, namely consciousness itself? Very important here, something many people get wrong—nobody is saying that electrons, atoms, rocks & chairs have selves (because they don’t generate an inner self model), have any sense of the environment (they don’t generate an inner model of their environment — hence they don’t have any experience of "self vs other"), they don’t have dreams, they don’t have memories, they don’t have instincts, they don’t have thoughts! But, they might very well have an inner nature — it might really "be like something to be" an electron or neutron. Rocks and chairs most likely not, because they seem to be simple “ensembles” or “piles” of particles instead of unitary entities. But what Andres is saying is that it’s the fundamental field as a whole which is conscious, not the excitation/particle per se. And he’s taking concepts from mathematics to explain how might a continuous cosmic quantum field/consciousness field give rise to separate "bubbles" of consciousness like us. He thinks that topology shows how a continuous field can generate a definite "pocket" within itself without necessitating any actual tear in its continuity. So you can see, this “Observer" (how you call it) is not supernatural. It’s very much natural, it’s physical — it’s the same stuff that science studies and the experimental apparatus interacts with. In fact, the experimental apparatus itself is made out of the EM field and other fields — it’s built from these fields’ excitations.

From the countless interactions we’ve had with brains in laboratory settings Andres takes that, even if all the physical fields are intrinsically conscious (again: no self, no perception of an outside world, no thoughts resembling our thoughts), our consciousness is very likely the brain’s EM field. Other fields participating in the physical structure of your brain might be conscious but they don’t take part in your consciousness.

So how then is the brain’s physical structure "manipulating the Observer". Well, firstly we must understand that the EM field (a.k.a the Observer) is part of the physical structure of the brain. We know that the excitations of the electron field influence the dynamics of the electromagnetic field and vice-versa. So the trains of electrical patterns (a.k.a. neural signals — what you’d be calling "matter dynamics") that perpetuate across the brain are triggering electromagnetic dynamics (a.k.a. the Observer), and in their turn the brain’s electromagnetic dynamics are feeding back into and influencing the electric patterns. Most neuroscience (but not all) is studying the patterns of neural electrical signals and ignoring the electromagnetic dynamics that accompany them. What Andres is focusing on is this second side of the coin, namely the electromagnetic dynamics.

And i could be wrong (I’m curious what Andres would say) but as i see it the battle of “pure replicators vs conscious agents” isn’t the same thing as “electric neural patterns vs electromagnetic dynamics”. Even in the most conscious embodiment of the bodhisattva, their enlightened, stable, compassionate, equanimous experience & behavior is the result of both electric patterns and electromagnetic patterns. And conversely, even in the most pure replicator individual that wants to make as many children as possible and grab as much land and riches as possible, and who’s pursuing these things mechanically without any awareness about their consequences over his personal experience and the experiences of all other people and animals, this pure-replicator like activity similarly stems from both electric patterns and electromagnetic patterns.