But my read is that this article is intending to throw a challenge in the direction of philosophers who advocate a materialist understanding of consciousness, but who aren't eliminative about the concept of consciousness. I.e. they believe it's meaningful to call humans "conscious", and they also believe that the phenomenon has a materialist explanation. This article aims to force them to either drop the concept, or accept that it can be applied very broadly.
Some certainly do, more specifically eliminative materialists: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/materialism-eliminative/
But my read is that this article is intending to throw a challenge in the direction of philosophers who advocate a materialist understanding of consciousness, but who aren't eliminative about the concept of consciousness. I.e. they believe it's meaningful to call humans "conscious", and they also believe that the phenomenon has a materialist explanation. This article aims to force them to either drop the concept, or accept that it can be applied very broadly.