I think you'd benefit from reading Helen Keller's autobigoraphy "the world i live in", you might reach the same conclusions I did, this being that perhaps conciousness is flavoured by our unique way of experiencing our world, but not strictly neccesary for conciousness of some kind or another to form. I beleive conciousness to be a tool a sufficently complex neural network will develop in order for it to achieve whatever objective it has been given to optimize for.