Sounds like this

* pushes the problem one level down ("why are cells conscious?")

* adds the problem of explaining how consciousness of a person relates to consciousness of its cells.

What would this model help explain?

Right, but it seems that both problems are easier than "it just emerges out of nothing".

Cells consciousness would be a much, much simpler sort of consciousness, something any "object" that somehow is capable of searching for food and avoiding "danger" should possess.

Higher level things emerging from similar, but lower level things is not a mystery, it's something expected (like ant colonies).

I'm vaguely for pan-psychism as in, it sounds good but I haven't thought about it for even 5 minutes. But I'm more interested in the version where all matter has some kind of proto-consciousness. Still, no idea how it's suposed to work in detail: how can it make a difference whether a particle is part of an information-processing system? There is an infinitude of mappings between physical systems and mathematical functions (I'm probably plagiarizing a half-forgotten version of this https://joe-antognini.github.io/ml/consciousness )

I has to go all the way down by that logic, right?