Consciousness is a loaded word. It tricks you into thinking that there's some profound concept here. There isn't.
When you contemplate consciousness you're not contemplating about anything profound. You're actually just contemplating vocabulary and how to map out the exact definition of the word "consciousness"
Really all it is, is just studying a collection of arbitrary intellectual attributes that we're not clear about which attributes are encompassed in the word "consciousness." Thinking about it results in just a large categorization problem of stating axioms like: " oh consciousness must include the ability to be sad" and other random attribute selection stuff.
It is a language phenomenon not a philosophical phenomenon. Don't fall for the trap. It is similar to the question what is "life." Well "life" is also another loaded word.
Consciousness is not well defined. To me, this indicates that we don't really know what's going on.