But I would also say we experience middling states between dreamless and fully conscious. Within dreams, partial lucidity, or heavy inebriation all have fragmented/shortened/discontinuous senses of time. In those states my consciousness is definitely less complete, but still present. Unconsciousness represents the lower limit of the scale, but is not conceptually separate from the scale.

What I derive from this is that anything can be considered conscious, so the magnitude is what we really need to consider. AI is already conscious, but so are ants. We don't give much weight to the consciousness of ants because it's a very dim level. A conscious like a computer for example, has no sense of displeasure at all. It's conscious but not in a way that invites moral concern, which I think is what we're getting at. When do we need to extend moral considerations to AI. If we keep AI emotionally inert, we don't need to regardless of how intelligent it becomes. We also will have a hard time grasping its values, which is an entirely different type of hazard.