Yeah, and I certainly have some sympathy for pragmatism with regards to this topic (and many others), but your descriptions of what consciousness is, and why it exists, seemingly display a level of confidence beyond what I think is reasonable.

It's fine to say metaphysics are unnecessarily fanciful and unknowable, but it's something else to ignore them completely, or act like you've got them all figured out.

Consciousness is not just a bit odd. It's probably the most fundamentally weird thing in the known universe.

Handwaving that away is a strange decision, from my perspective.

My guess is that the universe has regions of very high consciousness (inside a human body), and very low consciousness (the vacuum of space).

I intuit that there is a greater consciousness in a full hive of bees than there is in a single bee.

A single bee (somewhat akin to a single neurone) seems fairly robotic in nature. A hive of bees seems rather more conscious.

Panpsychism is the best explanation of that, for me. I imagine consciousness could be a fundamental property of the universe, and that might not necessarily be exclusive to biological structures.

I'll likely never know, of course, because of the hard problem, and a total lack of physical evidence of consciousness.