> Despite great progress in our scientific understanding of the brain, we still don’t have even the beginnings of an explanation of how complex electrochemical signaling is somehow able to give rise to the inner subjective world of colors, sounds, smells and tastes that each of us knows in our own case. There is a deep mystery in understanding how what we know about ourselves from the inside fits together with what science tells us about matter from the outside.
We can make a very simple robot that reacts to the environment - for example follows light and learns where the walls are so as not to collide with them in the future.
It checks all the boxes that simple life does - if you say that a bacteria experience world then so does that robot. So it is conscious but we know where it comes from - it comes from the computational power and interactions with the world it can do. There's no magical spiritualism around it, it's just nested if-then-elses + memory + feedback. Which btw is as good a definition for consciousness as any other. When you become unconscious the feedback loop is interrupted.
> “Of course, you can’t do that. I designed physical science to deal with quantities, not qualities.”
"Quantity has a quality of its own". There's no qualities in the universe, just quantities and we arbitrarily assign labels (qualities) to them.
In the end I think "is X conscious" is as productive a question as "is Pluto a planet" or "can submarines swim".