alt Hacker Newsyes and no. In my opinion, consciousness is not a process (yes I think Descartes was wrong). The 'thing' that is conscious, whatever it is, is the thing that is capable of experiencing the world. It doesn't need to do anything else to be conscious. Panpsychism is the closest thing to anything that make sense to me (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism). This view also makes it possible to separate consciousness from intelligence.
Sounds like you might also be tending towards Illusionism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliminative_materialism#Illusi...) the idea that "Consciousness" isn't a real "thing", or even a real property of a thing, just the name we give to one pattern that emerges from adaptive reasoning systems.
I think that Illusionism and related philosophies will tend to be seen as "correct" once AI systems become more and more commonplace, and people will be forced to dismiss the whole concept of "consciousness" along with mind/body dualism in general as a massive category error that philosophers have been making since antiquity.
When you get down to it, philosophy of consciousness mostly exists because philosophers have assumed that because "mind", "soul", "consciousness" etc are nouns in our language, and that since nouns are "persons places and things" and mind is a noun, mind must be a thing, which is of course not how language works and not sound logic.