https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergentism, yes it's clear that a lot has already been written about this kind of idea.

A difficulty is that it may interact with questions about the nature of existence and the nature of time. Would consciousness work properly in a deterministic block universe? What would be the relationship between my consciousness now and my consciousness of 10 seconds ago, do they both exist independently? Could you have consciousness that worked in a spacial dimension instead of time, by writing out the relevant calculations on a sheet of paper?

Funny, I thought about something very similar : could some path in the Mandelbrot set (or any other fractal) be called "conscious" ?