While this makes sense, an alternative hypothesis also makes sense: that consciousness just came when the hardware was there, and a standby state for it then ev

While this makes sense, an alternative hypothesis also makes sense: that consciousness just came when the hardware was there, and a standby state for it then evolved afterwards. It's easy to buy if you just postulate that the standby state wasn't actually necessary for a healthy mind at first. We started putting essential functions into that time window after it was there, and now we must sleep, but the original purpose was just a low-power mode to wait for morning or something. Supporting evidence: horses sleep 2 hours, cats sleep 16, and even humans vary widely in how much sleep they need. That's hard to explain if all of it is fundamentally necessary, but easy to explain if the precise length is irrelevant for biological purposes and that the length was determined by outside factors e.g. how much this species stands to gain from remaining in a low-power state.