The problem is all this talk of "onsciousness" is vague. It's like "free will" -- it's just words, not a real objective thing that can possibly be studied objectively. It's just that people are vain. We wanted to believe we lived at the center of the universe (or at least our collection of planets) and Copernicus taught us otherwise. Then we believed we were of a different sort of being than the animals until Darwin taught us otherwise. True machine intelligence (although we aren't there yet) frightens us in a very similar sense.