That's not very teasing at all to someone with a background in complex systems. He is giving a far too embellished view of emergence. Emergent phenomena should become a high school class rather sooner than later so people can clear up so many confusions about neuroscience's and physics' views of conscience. The book is good introduction but the pessimism detracts from the meat of the theory.
>it disappears constantly, is automatic, is ephemeral, it has no clear horizons or dimensions.[...]
As emergent phenomenon, conscience/self relies on the organization of its individual agents, yet the collective effective may or may not be ephemeral. It is ephemeral in restrict wording but it's actually quasi-persistent when you consider the succession of states is smooth, i.e, the difference between any two states that are immediately followed by one another, is rather small. The approximation is important because it's the difference between a short memory loss patient that can't link one state to the other and everyone else that have, as he put it, illusion of self (calling it an illusion does nothing to put it into a different status than it already is though, he's merely being materialist about it).
>Decisions happen many milliseconds before you feel you’ve made them, you also have literally no control over your motor functions or appetites. there’s just nothing going on there that resembles an agent.[...]
In light of the emergence paradigm, this is both obvious and mundane. The underground networks in an ant nest are an emergent phenomena built by the pheromone/smell relation of the queen and the other ants, but we do not claim the nest is doing roads by itself. What we do claim, is that the ant nest is a thing in its own, that has its own name, and its own properties that no worker ant neither the queen has. Likewise, a neuron cell does nothing that the human does, yet many cells do, there is nothing disenchanting about this because it makes 'us' abstract entities that result from very, very complex schema of individually simplistic/dumb agents.
Essentialism has been since long fought back to non-relevance, so I don't know what he is talking about in that passage. It shouldn't have followed from the fact that brains are nothing special that there is no afterlife, that should have come before really. Like I said to OP, I believe the root of disenchanting is the lack of education about how intricate and just how truly complex we are as phenomena. The simple fact that we cannot be treated as single elements but as the abstract part of a complex network that is "modular, networked together subsystems that resonate and intermingle but no consistent process we could call selfhood" with the added "perceived selfhood", should be the wet dream of most metaphysics. And this lack of consistency is even overestimated by him, as I said, conscience is quasi-persistent during most of the day.