I agree with your article, David. Paul Thomas Zenki's reply is interesting, but I think there are different concepts involved in his disagreement with you. As I see it, there are at least three differentr concepts: Self-awareness (what you, David are writing about), the "hard" problem of consciousness (What Paul is talking about), and at least one more: Attention. I have dealt with some of this in my article "Forget Qualia -- The useful aspect of consciousness is self-awareness" https://jmason37-80878.medium.com/forget-qualia-the-useful-aspect-of-consciousness-is-self-awareness-71da7f7783e6 .

Paul asserts that some brain activities are conscious and others are not, but I think it's a matter of degree of neuronal involvement. I am normally minimally conscious of the shapes and colors of people's clothing when I am dealing with them, but I CAN become more aware of them if my attention is called to them. I think attention just involves a higher level of activity in the "attentive" brain networks involved (the ones responding to shapes and colors and their integration) than to others (such as the ones that are responding to what the person is saying -- what I would normally be paying attention to). I think our attention-focusing mechanism is part of our short-term memory mechanism. (As integrated individuals we can only pay attention to and develop coordianted responses to a limited number of inputs at the same time.)

In us humans and some other animals, the attention mechanism has been supplemented, as you described, by a self-awareness mechanism.

And we humans have evolved a further, symbolic language mechanism.

So I don't think you and Paul Zanki's views are in opposition. I just think you are addressing different aspects of what we mean by the word "consciousness".