Any understanding, any processing, any function, any experience is not one thing but an accumulation of small experiences. Every one of those small parts of consciousness is one range of experience, one thing. A single-cell organism cannot report it's experience to us. The efforts and experiences of a single cell struggling for health and survival will add up as it's part of the efforts of a multi-cellular organism seeking it's own health and survival. A nerve cell must fire to grow and thrive.
Inactivity leads to atrophy and death.
I know how it works. Much like with the elite of theoretical physics, few can have this kind of mathematical ability. Some parts of the equation are difficult to explain in text because of the need to animate various diagrams in a variety of dimensions. This is the reason that so many mistakes can occur in philosophies of consciousness when so much bias for 'reportability' of experience and our lack of having any other way of communicating with each other means that the only logic we use is the logic of the brain that can be understood by the language center and expressed within the limits of such language. This is also the reason we identify a conscious and also a subconscious mind which are really the language and non-language minds.