[evanb]

I don't know. It's not clear to me what consciousness means, but if forced me to take a stance, I'd give a Hofstaderian response and say that it's a matter of degrees, and that perhaps consciousness is the experience of processing information. More than that, I don't think it can be said to be "even there"---or otherwise it's something outside of the content, arrangement, or behavior of our constituent matter.