Well sure, but you’re putting “pencilness” onto the collection of heterogeneous matter, same with any other level of analysis. Consciousness isn’t debatable by the thing doing it, it’s an irrepressible fact of existence to the conscious thing. Science needs a falsifiable hypothesis for the “why” of the material->consciousness transition, and constructing such a hypothesis is difficult for a lot of reasons. Saying “it emerges from neuron connections” just doesn’t capture the issue. Why should neuron connections produce this observer thing when we seem to see machines do similar things without it? Is a sufficiently large recurrent neural network conscious by the same process? If not or if so, then why? What precisely produces the phenomenon. Emergence is an observation, not a hypothesis for why that observation occurred. It could just be a trick of the light.