Here's another thing to consider. There are states of consciousness that are arbitrarily strange compared to your daily one (e.g., in certain dreams, or during extreme psychedelic experiences, even in deep sleep). It takes some training to be lucidly aware during those, but they lend insight into the irreducible features of consciousness. Whatever they are, they must exist in the intersection (in the set-theoretic sense) of those experiences. The only common feature I can identify can be expressed as something like... the sheer sense of existence.
Almost all of my daily life involves some sort of modeling and planning, which I think is why so many models of consciousness take that as a starting point. But I think it's important to incorporate non-ordinary states if we want to capture the entirety of the concept. (I'm not saying that the brain isn't doing some sort of modeling even when I'm in non-ordinary states, including contentless ones, but it fails to capture the interesting aspects of the phenomenon under question.)
Almost all of my daily life involves some sort of modeling and planning, which I think is why so many models of consciousness take that as a starting point. But I think it's important to incorporate non-ordinary states if we want to capture the entirety of the concept. (I'm not saying that the brain isn't doing some sort of modeling even when I'm in non-ordinary states, including contentless ones, but it fails to capture the interesting aspects of the phenomenon under question.)