The nature of consciousness is not sufficiently understood to go in further depth now. Just let’s say that philosophers had millenia to come up with something more than unprovable babbling, so now it’s time for them to hand the playing field over to somebody with proper imaging systems and other instrumentation.
(The main obstacle for philosophy to be useful is the absence of mechanisms for weeding out untenable claims.)
I would dare to call in doubts that not everything is data. We can consider data synonymous with information. Everything can be considered to be matter/energy (two forms of one thing), and an information about its spatiotemporal configuration. Not even nebulous things like consciousness can escape this trap of being bound into configuration of matter; splatter the brain around and consciousness stops.
I would claim that the hypothesis that consciousness is linked with the configuration of matter in brain (and the related processes that keep changing it) is rather solid, based on the results of events (e.g. traumatic brain injuries) leading to sudden changes in its configuration and the consequent partial or total loss of performance. Whatever the base of consciousness is, whether purely electrochemical or with added quantum effects, it is more than likely to be encoded in the structure of matter (or, a form of data/information). No need for further “magic sauce”.
