This is probably a semantic issue seeing as we don't have a widely agreed definition of it. I like to think about it in terms of self-reflective, subjective experience. I'm not even sure if emotions would be a requirement and was surprised to see Chiang so hung up on them. Would he consider humans which can have a variety of mental disorders, causing a complete lack of some of them to not poses consciousness?

>Consciousness doesn't exist

I can confirm that this is incorrect.