I think one can have more views than "everything, including stones have consciousness" and "there is something special about our brains, an element that isn't o

I think one can have more views than "everything, including stones have consciousness" and "there is something special about our brains, an element that isn't on the periodic table". The best explanation I've heard is that consciousness is an emergent property. The components are easily understandable but their complex interactions become increasingly hard to understand the more components you add. Also, humans love to think they are special. And in some certain way we are. We are a big step of the evolutionary process of life. Usually, once such a big step happens, the first species (group) which figures it out becomes incredibly successful. E.g. the first plants that managed to live outside of water pools could colonize the barren landscape because there was no competition. Usually after such a step, this incredibly successful species then drifts and diversifies into multiple different sub-species and after a while there is a large ecosystem of species. We humans have discovered intelligence and now believe we are special, but in a few hundred years there'll likely be many types/kinds of intelligent structures we've built (not neccessarily our "biological" descendants, but this distinction matters little to life itself, which has a multitude ways of creating "biological" descendants anyways including things that don't involve any descendants at all like bacterial conjugation). Some of those structures we'll regard as conscious, others we won't. Consciousness will also vary in type and form, just how there are different ways for plants to vary in type of form. We are that first moss that colonized the lands. If you told that moss how plants could look like in 2020 (and it would understand the question), it would probably react similarly as people do to the Chinese Room argument.