I think your essay (not necessarily your reasoning) is missing an important part of the theory of emergent phenomena: random mutation and natural selection. As far as I can tell for now, the two main factors of consciousness that people go gaga about are Awareness and Agency. I think we'll eventually explain both as a combination of massively complex interconnection 'noise' combined with a complex connection reinforcement biasing and feedback mechanism. When combined with post hoc pattern recognition ("People do shit. They have reasons for doing shit; in that order"-Dave Maleckar), we remember having intention and awareness of actions and thoughts that were actually spewed out of a random number generator, but the memories and thoughts(just more memory data recombined (see "dream cycles") that fit our awareness narrative are reinforced and those that don't are recycled into the randomizer's SSD bubble memory pathways.

I've seen this physically manifest in the behavior of a cow, and it appears to be a quantifiable spectrum across living animals, but it's nonlinear. Some animals seem to be better over time at selection for useful memories(imagined or sensed), while others are non-adaptive and depend on more reaction speed or power to survive, so don't have need for extra brain cells to 'remember the future' (make models/imagine).

We think we're smart because we are awake (running simulations), but awake isn't necessarily aware: especially in a closed cycle environment. We keep seeking an outside consciousness because civilization protects our imagination from the greater world's pruning shears.

Consciousness appears to be a neurosystem-based running simulation of evolution itself. Every "thought" is a species in its own subroutine: competing with other subroutines for influence, growth and carryover legacy into the next day's simulation (after nightly resetting).

Complex and amazing, but like our economic system, it mostly generates losers (forgotten patterns) and only a few winners that connect with and reinforce each other.