If your answer to "how can anything be conscious" is "it just can, if the system meets these requirements", then obviously, that's the only answer and you may as well move on to "what are we conscious of?"
At this point, I'm not willing to regard consciousness as something like gravity or the weak force, though I concede that it could turn out that way.
My personal train of thought is this: 1) We know consciousness exists (as far as evidence goes it has more than anything else since it is the conduit to everything else) and 2) We know it is composed, in some way and to some degree, of information.
Information might be a small piece, and it might be the thing itself, but it's the only tangible avenue we have to pursue, so I don't think it's a matter of them answering or discussing a different question, I think it's them framing the same question with slightly different assumptions.
This is debatable. If you subscribe to the idea that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon, then it makes sense as an avenue to the answer.