It's obvious that you conflate consciousness with awareness. I have my doubts whether we will ever be able to measure the brain "doing the consciousness thing", but it's a subjectively observable fact that consciousness is without any attributes whatsoever and is the "source" from which we derive our notion of "I-ness" (even though, for obvious reasons, consciousness itself is directly subjectively unobservable).

Thus the more interesting questions to me are: if consciousness is indeed an emergent property, and considering the morphological and physiological similarities between brains of mammals and other animals (certainly at least birds), what is the minimal necessary neural complexity to generate consciousness, and, considering all of the above, how can billions of totally unique brains produce a phenomenon that is identical to a T?