Consciousness is the ghost in the machine that seems to be unnecessary to the functioning and behavior of the machine.

All of your interactions with the outside world can be explained by the signals in your brain, even our discussion of consciousness can easily be explained by physical/measurable processes.

This conversation would still happen in a universe without any conscious entities . Of course you can build a machine that can recursively think about its self, and in turn speak about this self awareness. This should all be able to happen without there being a subjective experience of that self-awareness.

So why is anything experienced at all.