Peter Watts tells it better than me, but basically, looking at studies that show the human body reacts to, for example, a baseball flying at its face before the conscious parts of the brain even get a signal from the brain stem, one could argue that there's not really a point to the conscious brain at all.

This alongside the idea that bacteria or trees proliferate just fine without it, etc etc. This is the jist of my argument, if you want a way better analysis, please read peter watts, he is smarter than me and the work is already done.

For defending against flying baseball it may be true, but there is very little chance we could build society, economy, etc. where flying baseball exists without conscious parts of the brain.

I read Blindsight(3 times actually), and he described some end result there, skipping whole evolution process, in which that alien Intelligence (Rorschach) may or may not compete with conscious creatures.

Additionally the hypothesis that Rorschach doesn't have conscious or not managed or directed by creatures with conscious is just guess of that expedition, which doesn't really understand what Rorschach is.

From another hand, evolution on Earth demonstrates that conscious creatures (humans) completely outcompete all others.