The question still stands. How would a creature experience life without consciousness?
Or let's even say you created a generally intelligent neural net with sufficient sensors, cameras, and actuators for it to live in our physical world, piped into the neural network. It learns to use it's sensors and actuators, much like a growing child would. What is it's experience? How does this neural network experience life as compared to our brains?
To give you a hint, it wouldn't have a Heads-Up-Display with a battery indicator. It would feel tired or hungry. It would experience life immersed in the world to the extent that it's sensors would allow it. It's sensors would be naturally fused in it's neural net in whatever way was most optimal for it's environment. Much in the same way that we use sight, sensation in our feet and muscles, and the liquid in our ears to maintain our balance without ever thinking about the source or distinction in the data our brains are receiving.
It wouldn't. "experience of life" ~= consciousness.
People say the same thing the passage of time, too. We live in a block where all events, past, present, and future are fixed and unchanging.
It's essentially denialism: if a phenomenon doesn't fit well into my framework, it must not really exist because framework.