One of the thins which is attractive about Wei's approach, as I understand it, is that it does not try to answer the question of whether a given system is conscious, at least not in yes-or-no terms. Rather, it tries to give a probability that a given system is conscious, and specifically that it instantiates a particular consciousness, such as my own.
This allows you to have such things as systems which are "probably" conscious, or, in a sense, "partially" conscious (in the sense that we can treat them as having a 10% chance of being conscious, say). This interpretation makes most sense in the context of the Strong Self-Selection Assumption (that we can consider our moments of experience as randomly chosen from among all observer-moments). The probabilities assigned to consciousness serve as a weighting factor for how much they contribute to the ensemble of all observer-moments. We don't try to ask, "is it like something to be this rock, or this brain". We ask, what is the probability that it is like something to be this rock, or perhaps, what is the probability that it is like "being me right now" to be this rock. In Chalmer's "fading qualia", he points out the unreasonability of describing systems as being partially conscious, maybe halfway between between being conscious as we are and being zombies. But Wei's approach avoids this while still allowing for gradations of consciousness. He does not try to imagine what it is like to be one of those systems which is "50% conscious", rather he simply incorporates the 50% in the contribution the system makes to the overall ensemble of conscious systems. Wei's method is reminiscent of an objective variant on Hans Moravec's pan-psychism, the notion that everything is potentially conscious, it's just a matter of how we look at it. Hans would say that a brain seems conscious to us and a rock does not, because the mapping needed to see the brain's consciousness is simpler from our perspective than the mapping that would be necessary for the rock's. He raises the possibility that there could be other observers in our own world for whom the rock was conscious but the brain was not, because the mapping was simpler in that direction for them. Wei's approach rejects the subjective element but retains the notion that there is a degree of probability for any system's consciousness. The brain's probability is very high, and the rock's is very low. The construction of the probabilities might be operationally very similar to Hans' model, having to do with how complex the mapping would have to be (similar as well to Jacques Mallah's proposal). But it is given an objective interpretation. In effect we reject the notion that there are legitimate observers for whom the rock is conscious. Whether there is a sound objective basis for doing so is still unclear to me. Hal