Trees over long horizons adapt to their environments and there is some level of agency. Perhaps they are conscious on a longer time horizon than humans. And perhaps aliens or AI will see humans as very slow and similarly think we are not conscious.
What the genome offers is biases for the solution the organism finds to solve its problems. Not an explicit structure, so you need fewer bits. The biases help when the search space is too large and needs to be constrained
Computational: a claim about the minimal model for a system. computational means the system is made up of discernible differences (info) that relate to one another. These change over “time” (any dimension?) by some state transition
Functionalism: a claim about what a thing is. an object is what it does to its environment, and the invariants it preservers. The alternative would be that things have an essence that defines their realness independently