I agree with this. I think consciousness "happens" when you cross a certain complexity threshold. For argument's sake let's say this happens around 100 billion interconnections. Cross this threshold and consciouness "bursts" into being.
What is consciousness? Well, for me a big part of it is the "movie screen" of my vision. Consciousness is sort of like this movie I can watch, with the understanding that the hands that go into the field of vision are my own- "I" can control them and my body's position in the field. If I want the field to change, I can make the movie look somewhere else. My consciousness also includes the full mapping of the body, including its pain and pleasure states, temperature, hunger, etc etc.
Language is a large part of consciousness, in particular, English. Integrating language into my consciousness was pretty catastrophic- it was like formatting my conscsiouness with a new files system. Apparently it erased all memories previous to that because I can't remember anything earlier than that. English both enables and limits the scope of what I can think. It has a lot of ambiguities and is only moderately good at feelings, and emotions. But hey, it has tenses which vaguely relate to this sensation of passing time that is relevant to my consciousness and a significant portion of reality can successfully be communicated to me by any other consciousness running the Englihs module. If I wanted to be more precise I suppose I could convery my consciousness to LOGLAN or some other language built on predicate calculus rather than germanic and latin grammar base.
In addition to all this, my consciousness stores a lot of memories, skills, ideas, and memes. I have models for basic mathematical concepts, as well as skill sets such as how to operate a motor vehicle. I also have prejudices and preferences. My consciousness is limited by this- if I were not familiar with certain philosophical memes, such as "social contracts", my consciousness would not be able to understand advantages of a national healthcare plan.
Emotions are also part of my consciousness. There is happiness, a "feeling" of well-being when dopmanine, electricity, magnetism, radio waves, and more are flowing rather well. I am likely to be happy when the majority of my body and psyche's needs are met and I am pleasantly engaged and using enough, but not too much, of my energy bandwidth. Anger is a territorial response I would feel in my consciousness when I feel my phsyical or psychological territories are being threatened- it is a territory defense response. Sadness is a tension I feel when there is cognitive dissonance between an idealized vision I have of how things should be. (Tears of sadness if things are worse than I feel they should be, happiness if they are better.) Sadness may also be felt due to various social rejections as my organic ape-mind has a great deal of hardware devoted to social interactions. Pain is experienced when my nerves detect entropy is increasing in my wetware.
As for communicating with other sentiences, this seems inevitable as more species approach and cross Threshold. If humans are at 100 billion+ (or whatever Threshold requires), there are many speces which must be very close. Some of the more advanced marine mammals such as dolphins and whales are apparently very close, let's say 98 billion interconnections, and they even have some of the advanced cerebrocortical structures we think of as giving us our higher civilized thought structures. Elephants, chimps and other greater apes, and maybe dogs, cats, pigs, and some birds seem to be climbing above the 70 billion mark.
If we could figure out how to artificially enhance brains with more interconnections, both human and animal, we could probably "boost" several near-sentient animals across the line by nano-creating more neural interconnections. Energy would flow across the new connections and they would "burst" into their own version of movie-screen of consciousness. It would be fun having other sentiences to talk to. I think we as humans are fairly lonely and could benefit from some non-human perspectives. (Even though human perspectives vary and we don't really appreciate variety even from our fellow different human sentiences.) Still, it would be fun to boost an elephant across the sentience line and then hear their thoughts. It would be fun to know there are other sentient beings out there.