Dear Matt,
> "I will argue, simply because we do not yet have any really good mathematical or physical theory of consciousness, that the theme of this essay contest is premature, and unlikely to lead to any resolution that would be widely accepted in the mathematics or physics communities"
That's right, at this stage we can only speculate. This is useful too: although not Popperian science, but a part that leads to hypotheses. Most of them untestable at this moment, and those that can be tested don't clarify a bit what is consciousness.
> "event horizons fail Popper falsifiability, while apparent/trapping horizons are perfectly acceptable science in Popper's sense"
You are right about event and apparent horizons, and I admire Hawking for being willing to give up ideas he previously endorsed with enthusiasm. I guess that many physicists who were bothered with the apparent information loss in black holes considered the horizon as local, apparent, and gave little weight to the teleological definition, although this one is the right one. Or perhaps they didn't ignore it, but the timelessness of the block world view made the involved teleology appear OK.
Regarding the wavefunction collapse, I agree again with the insufficiency of decoherence and various interpretations of QM is well supported. But I think teleology is not present only in Wigner-like interpretations. I think any attempt to a realistic interpretation, if it has to account for nonlocality and especially contextuality, has to be teleological. Elements of reality, whatever they are, have to be nonlocal both in space and time. Of course, I wouldn't speculate that this sort of teleology explains the tiniest bit of consciousness. I just think it is unavoidable, unless we give up reality, and replace with something like qubism (although I think this still only hides it by refusing to discuss about the physical processes between measurements). But I think that relativity comes to rescue, since the block world view makes this teleology or apparent retrocausality more digestible. Only if we want the world to start with any possible initial configuration and evolve in time in such a way that we don't see Schrodinger cats and the measurements have definite outcomes, we have to include the collapse or reject reality.
Your essay is enjoyable to read and contains good arguments, which converge well to the conclusion.
Best regards,
Cristi Stoica