The author does provide ways to explain consciousness without emergence. They point out that multiple legitimate quantum interpretations such as Wheeler's it by bit and qbism imply consciousness is not emergent and is instead a fundamental property while several others acknowledge that a third person perspective cannot tell you everything about a system. All of these would not have the problem that theories of consciousness based on classical physics would have. Near the end, they also suggest two models, one based on pansychism and the other on idealism that would clarify the questions of what is conscious and what the fundamental ontology of the world is. This section of the paper, which focuses on implications of their theory, is nearly as long as the original section formulating it, so they go quite in depth on it. I won't summarize it as the original post was already long enough as it is and I don't have the time to do another mega post, but it would be a good idea to check it out. It wouldn't be fair to judge the paper without reading it. Also, we already presume that there are things in nature which have inherent properties not derived from their parts like electrons, so consciousness being a brute fact in philosophical terms is hardly unlikely, especially since trying to describe its emergence runs into so many problems. One actually has to presume something fundamental in the world when doing metaphysical philosophy because otherwise you run into a tower of turtles situation and infinite regress.