Consciousness is a misnomer here.

What I'm actually talking about is decision making. This applies to higher and lower life forms. Even a bacteria will decide things from moment to moment. Well okay how does this happen? Well something in the background must provide new data to the "tick". Ticks don't rebuild on each turn. They get re-used. But that re-use is updated from sensory inputs, memory, and then is filtered to limit how many tokens each congitive tick is forced to process. Anyway consciousness is an emergent property of this system. We're just state machines ultimately.