I also found this frustrating, in pretty much the way I guessed I would. Nearly all pop discussions of consciousness (and a good chunk of unpop discussions) approach it in bad faith, because if you come at it rationally, you run up against conclusions that most people have no intention of accepting.
For instance, the video opens with “no one has come close to explaining it”. Well, Daniel Dennett, for one, offers a perfectly good and well-known explanation of consciousness; it’s just that what people actually want is an explanation of why consciousness is an unknowable mystery. That question has the built-in safety feature that, because it’s not a valid question, there’s no danger of it leading to an answer, which might result in unacceptable conclusions like “sentient AI is possible” and “humans aren’t fundamentally different to the animals we kill and eat”.
If you take that approach, you can detour into all sorts of irrelevant fun facts about animal behavior (or pretty much anything else, if you’re Roger Penrose and worried about the car payments) but you won’t learn anything useful about consciousness because the whole exercise is set up to avoid that.
