> since our best bet is that consciousness is maybe/probably an emergent property of information processing in the brain

Only if approached from a materialist perspective. The thing about consciousness -- which is to say the experience of being that people believe separates them from, say, a brick -- is that it can only be verified subjectively. I have consciousness because I experience it, I only assume other human beings have consciousness because they are like me, but I have no way of proving that they are not just sufficiently complicated automatons pretending to be human.