I agree with you. I really enjoy this idea that understanding, conscience, are emerging properties of a system, which does not need to limit itself to any scope to happen. In that light the current approach most people take on this, taking an arbitary selection of parts to see if it exhibits those properties, is not right at all.

A ion channel does not have even a tiny spec of conscience, no matter how you organize them, but our brain does indeed need those to be conscient (and incidentally it relies on a whole lot more "stupid" parts than that: try being conscient without oxygen, or glucose).

I would go as far as making conscience an emergent property of interaction with the environment: what does it mean to be conscious if nothing is there to confirm that you are indeed of a singular conscience? Is it possible to understand the concept of self if you have no concept of other beings?