I doubt it bothers me in the sense you have in mind. What bothers me is the desire to actually understand it and always see all the smart people stuck on a non-starter. And it’s the first idea most smart people have about what consciousness must be. I also thought this when I was a teenager and after reflecting on it for many years decided it does not work.

I believe animals have consciousness and probably plants may have some kind of qualia so also may have it, so your charges against me seem misdirected. If an AI system happened to have qualia I believe it would depend on its substrate (which might be something we don’t understand yet), not because of how intelligent (how complicated it’s processing). And I believe a different substrate running the same processing may not have qualia. I don’t think we randomly chose the right substrate in the 60s-70s.

And I don’t argue against the idea that concepts like heaps are emergent. You’re making a logical error in assuming you know what consciousness is and thus I don’t know what emergence means. No, I do not think consciousness is emergent in the sense of a sand pile.

And before the army of false dichotomists show up, my position is not biological chauvinism or whatever your LLM has told you about.

Now you've put yourself into a trap. "Consciousness is emergent" but also "Consciousness is not emergent". Only one of these statements can be true. Life is that sand pile. We were a pile of chemicals that got hit by lightning or whatever billions of years ago, and from those uncountable chemical and electrical reactions nature evolved a programming machine that reliably produces conscious entities from non-conscious materials. Again, 4 billion year old sand pile.

Personally I reject the hard problem of consciousness. People keep having to try to invent magic, god, or unfound sciences for an issue that is simply complex but right in front of us.