Here's how I'd unpack the proposal, layer by layer.

The problem being solved

Neuroscience is good at finding feature-detectors: cells for edges, motion, colour-opponency, faces. But the classical brain it reveals is a spatially scattered aggregate of discrete, all-or-nothing action potentials. Nothing in that picture makes many neurons "one thing." Yet experience is unitary — you don't live a jagged list of colours, shapes and sounds; you experience a single bound scene. The gap between the aggregate mechanism and the unified phenomenology is the binding problem (a generalisation of the combination problem). Crucially, Pearce's charge is that classical binding proposals — synchrony, oscillatory phase-locking, integrated information, recurrent processing — are still just aggregates under another description. "Packaging" the firings differently doesn't create numerical identity: a mere sum of discrete processes is not a unitary experience, no matter how tightly synchronised.

The conjecture

What is not an aggregate? A coherent superposition. |A⟩ + |B⟩ is a single, holistic state with definite phase relations between its components — one mathematical object, not a list of objects. So the conjecture says: the physical correlate of a moment of phenomenally bound experience is a coherent superposition of distributed neuronal feature-processing states ("Schrödinger's neurons"). Binding is what a neuronal superposition feels like from the inside. Unity of consciousness = the literal unity of the wavefunction.

Why the measurement problem is the other side of the coin

Standard QM has an embarrassment: the formalism assigns amplitudes to superpositions, yet we only ever experience definite, classical outcomes. Collapse interpretations bolt on an extra postulate. Decoherence-only and Everettian accounts say instead that the superposition principle never breaks down — unitarity is universal, and "definite outcomes" are what a decohered branch looks like from within.

The proposal takes that seriously all the way up, including in the skull:

• Pre-decoherence: the brain's global state is one coherent superposition of feature-processing patterns → the unity of a bound percept.
• Decoherence (interaction with the environment): one branch is effectively selected → the definiteness of the experienced outcome.
• After the fact: from inside a branch, the dynamics can be treated classically — a "subjectively classical simulation."

So your experience of a determinate classical outcome is itself mediated by the superposition that preceded decoherence. Definiteness and unity are two aspects of one never-collapsing wavefunction: the measurement problem (why does the superposed formalism yield definite experience?) and the binding problem (how does the aggregate brain yield unitary experience?) get the same answer.

Note the corollary: on an objective-collapse interpretation, superpositions literally turn into classical aggregates in the brain — and then the binding problem comes roaring back, because you're left with a mere aggregate after all. That's why the "never breaks down" clause is doing real work, not decoration.

The radical commitments

1. Everettian/wavefunction monism — no fundamental collapse, anywhere.
2. Physicalism about consciousness as intrinsic nature — superpositions aren't unconscious machinery; they're experiential states (the "fire" in the equations). Otherwise you've just relocated the hard problem.
3. Anti-dualist bullet-biting on decoherence — Tegmark-style estimates put decoherence timescales for neural superpositions around 10⁻¹³ s, versus millisecond neurodynamics. The conjecture bites this bullet: binding must be pre-decoherent and fast, and if coherent superpositions of neuronal firing patterns are conclusively ruled out (e.g., by interferometry), the conjecture is empirically falsified — a rarity in consciousness science, and a virtue Pearce stresses.
4. Contrast with Penrose–Hameroff — they invoke quantum effects for non-computable cognition and keep collapse; this proposal invokes superposition for binding and denies collapse. The explanatory target is different.

The honest summary

If true, the conjecture dissolves two problems with one move: minds are unitary because superpositions are unitary; the world seems classical because decohered branches are how superpositions look from the inside. The cost is accepting that the warm, wet brain sustains macroscopic coherence at exactly the scale and speed where mainstream physics says it cannot — which makes the conjecture beautiful, precise, and either a genuine solution or a falsifiable mistake.