Within my very limited grasp of the paper, it seems to me it is asserting precisely the opposite of your second claim. Tegmark seems to me to be proposing a lim

Within my very limited grasp of the paper, it seems to me it is asserting precisely the opposite of your second claim. Tegmark seems to me to be proposing a limited set of properties that an assemblage of matter must have in order to exhibit, or perhaps to implement, consciousness. So he is denying a "universal animism" (because the properties are not univerally present), and attributing consciousness to operations of matter, so not presuming "mental constructs" apart from matter either.