It is true that human consciousness is continuous over time, but maybe some animals have very little of that? Or, to look at it like Black Mirror, if you uploa

It is true that human consciousness is continuous over time, but maybe some animals have very little of that? Or, to look at it like Black Mirror, if you upload your consciousness into a machine, are you not conscious if it pauses the simulation for a moment? Perhaps you would have no memory of that time (like in Severance), but you could still be conscious at other times. I do agree that a model at rest, just sitting on a hard drive, doesn't seem capable of consciousness. I also agree x^2 is not conscious. But the problem, philosophically, is actually separating those cases from things we know are conscious. The point of Searle's Chinese Room theorem is that he thinks no machine - not x^2, not a super-AI that passes the Turing Test - truly "thinks" (experiences, understands, feels, is conscious). But that position seems really hard to defend, even if it gives the "right" answer for x^2.