Two thoughts. First, consciousness may exist by itself, e.g. is a book that describes itself in a complex enough way conscious? It wouldn’t even require the flow of time or a reader, but once you read it, it’s clearly self-aware. That’s a hard notion of consciousness.
Second, the easy, down to earth answer to “what is conscious” (iow, where do “beings” end) is where a structured perception ends. Your hand is a part of you because of a broadband link to it. It ends at the skin and hair. Lack of signal and control separates you from everything else. Organized groups have much less bandwidth and while still “pan-“, that’s much lower level of consciousness. Sometimes they synchronize well enough, but that’s just a correlation.
This is a very interesting line of reasoning, particularly the "high bandwidth connection" kind of criteria. Our native five senses can be augmented with high-capacity links to all kinds of sensors and actuators. Where is the boundary when we can plug things into our brains with as much bandwidth and precision of control as our native limbs? Cyborgs...
Second, the easy, down to earth answer to “what is conscious” (iow, where do “beings” end) is where a structured perception ends. Your hand is a part of you because of a broadband link to it. It ends at the skin and hair. Lack of signal and control separates you from everything else. Organized groups have much less bandwidth and while still “pan-“, that’s much lower level of consciousness. Sometimes they synchronize well enough, but that’s just a correlation.