Implicit in this article is that consciousness has to look like human consciousness. The author all but admits that he cannot fathom consciousness evolving in any manner besides how biological life evolved on earth. He needs to read/watch more science fiction to broaden his philosophical imagination. Is HAL 9000 from Space Odyssey 2001 conscious? Are the beings from the future who built the tesseract in Interstellar conscious? There's no evidence they have hormones or indeed are embodied at all.