> Have you heard of Integrated Information Theory?

That was a wasted opportunity. It didn't lead anywhere, it's missing essential pieces, and it has been proven that "systems that do nothing but apply a low-density parity-check code, or other simple transformations of their input data" have high IIT (link).

A theory of consciousness should explain why consciousness exists in order to explain how it evolved. Consciousness has a purpose - to keep itself alive, and to spread its genes. This purpose explains how it evolved, as part of the competition for resources of agents sharing the same environment. It also explains what it does, why, and what's the cost of failing to do so.

I see consciousness and evolution as a two part system of which consciousness is the inner loop and evolution the outer loop. There is no purpose here except that agents who don't fight for survival disappear and are replaced by agents that do. So in time only agents aligned with survival can exist and purpose is "learned" by natural selection, each species fit specifically to their own niche.