[a_lieb]

In Tegmark's case, his hypothesis doesn't necessarily imply that consciousness escapes the laws of physics in any sense, even somewhat. He's simply arguing that consciousness is a state of matter, like liquid, solid or gas, and its properties emerge from lower-level physical laws, just like the other states of matter. Kind of a wild claim, but still compatible with strict materialism.

Tegmark's theory is an expanded version of Tononi's Integrated Information Theory, which has gotten a lot of interest in mainstream cognitive science. IIT also stays well within the laws of physics.

Non-materialist philosophers of mind tend to like these theories since they make consciousness correspond with fairly low-level processes, and that looks a lot more plausible than consciousness being something that only pops up in animal brains for some mystical reason. But neither IIT nor Tegmark's approach actually require any kind of escaping from the laws of physics. In fact Tononi sounds to me mostly like a materialist, although he's pretty slippery about it. Not as sure about Tegmark.

Also, important to note that almost no one believes in vitalism (the idea that life itself requires special extra-physical "secret sauce" to exist) anymore. It is only consciousness that is up for debate in mainstream philosophy.