I am reading Emperor's New Mind and do not at all come away with this conclusion. I am tempted almost to ask whether we refer to the same book. There is without doubt something deep and mysterious going on at the level of fundamental perception and it is intangible. There must of course be a material aspect to perception and some understanding of this is imperative but it is not appropriate to simply declare that materiality encompasses all because we can't describle or understand something real in non-material terms.
It is a stretch for ordinary humanity, even brilliant ordinary humanity, to try to understand that space-time is an aspect of physicality or that light speed is constant relative to everything else. Neither of these make any sense at all from an everyday perspective, which is the perspective in which we all live. And this is only classical physics. Things become much stranger at the quantum level. Some physicist wag once said that anyone who thinks they understand quantum mechanics hasn't studied it enough. I agree. Einstein was wrong about it. I would go so far as to say that the conscious, everyday perceptional frame of reference and mode of thinking is inadequate to really understand it and that this is because what we experience is not what's really going on at quantum levels.
My position would be that there is some "thing" that is operative, immaterial and intangible at the heart of reality and that anything less than this acknowledgement is denial.
(Forgive me if this is sketchy; I haven't read it since it first came out and don't have it handy.) Near the beginning of the book, he lays out four possible hypotheses of consciousness. He labelled them A, B, C and D. "A" is that brains are computers, in effect. I forget what "B" was. He advocated "C", which boiled down to "consciousness is material but not algorithmic". "D" states that consciousness is not material (your position). I can't remember whether he rejects that explicitly, but he certainly doesn't adopt that as his position.
I would go so far as to say that the conscious, everyday perceptional frame of reference and mode of thinking is inadequate to really understand it and that this is because what we experience is not what's really going on at quantum levels.
That's precisely what I said: you can't describe the more fundamental in terms of the less fundamental. The point is that that weirdness (grokkable or not) is all we can reasonably mean when we talk about "material"; all the quotidian properties come along for the ride. To say that the quantum mechanical is immaterial is an oxymoron: quantum mechanics itself is the true essence of materiality.
You say that I can't truly understand quantum physics, and that's fine. It's a fair cop. But that doesn't affect my assertion of the materiality of consciousness one jot or tittle. All it means is that I can't fully grasp the nature of materiality, not that materiality isn't up to the task of supporting either a physical universe or a conscious mind. Materialism is not dead.
Oh, but did I fail to mention it? I don't believe that quantum weirdness plays any special role in consciousness in any case. I expect it will be discovered that the quotidian properties of macroscopic matter will be quite enough to account for all the properties of our minds.