consciousness is just a real-time continuous representation of time/space, i.e. of the parts of the universe in front of us (and some of it already within us, i.e. memory and imagination).
Overall, I feel I'm trying to push against another philosophical maxim that I know: "If somebody tells you that consciousness does not exist, it's all just measurement and neuron signals - believe them"
My first interpretation is that it's saying that people who say that might be philosophical zombies, lacking consciousness.
That's why I said real-time and continuous. All digital systems, at the lowest level of computations are discrete, not continuous (i.e. analog). And the changes happening in real-time, i.e. the transistors values changing in processing units are very far removed from a representation of reality. What I mean by that is that if you are watching a video of a desert on a computer screen and took a snapshot of the transistor values in a GPU/CPU happening at the same time, they is no good mapping from one to the other (Since that one screenshot may be computed by thousands of computation cycles in the GPU/CPU).
Consciousness is the step towards the next point in the many world multiverse.
Without the ability to be blind to the future, life as we know it wouldn't exist. Nothing conscious would take risks and so complexity couldn't evolve.
If you could glance to the future and see all of the laid out spacetime, there wouldn't be any interesting exploration of it.
So we have to be blinkered just to exist with this level of insight into the complexities of the universe.