Uhhh... Feelings do something in the social sphere, which is where we all live. An individual person feeling feelings and not adequately suppressing an emotional response is akin to an individual neuron firing.
By "consciousness" and "feelings" he doesn't mean "self-awareness" and "emotions", he means "sentience": the fact that you/we have any kind of internal experience. We have to look past the definitional debate to the real "hard problem of consciousness", which is: why is there any experience at all? Why aren't we all just philosophical-zombies?