> Probably an unavoidable property that emerges from the sheer and perverse complexity of the human brain
I don't think complexity alone leads to consciousness. Rather, consciousness is the mechanism by which information is integrated in a relatively resource-cheap fashion: dump all this info into a shared mental workspace, add some reflective awareness of that info/workspace, and bam, you can both process the information in an integrated way, and you're also now aware of it all. The higher-level information processing and the awareness go hand-in-hand.
There're good reasons why most of the leading theories of consciousness focus on information integration. (Baars' Global Workspace Theory, Graziano's Attention Schema Theory, Tononi's Integrated Information Theory, etc.)
I don't see how the sensations of color, sound, etc come out of information integration. Sensory experience along with internal sensations form the hard problem of consciousness.
I don't think complexity alone leads to consciousness. Rather, consciousness is the mechanism by which information is integrated in a relatively resource-cheap fashion: dump all this info into a shared mental workspace, add some reflective awareness of that info/workspace, and bam, you can both process the information in an integrated way, and you're also now aware of it all. The higher-level information processing and the awareness go hand-in-hand.
There're good reasons why most of the leading theories of consciousness focus on information integration. (Baars' Global Workspace Theory, Graziano's Attention Schema Theory, Tononi's Integrated Information Theory, etc.)