I don't personally think phenomenal consciousness is in principle required for any particular functional behavior at all - rather that phenomenal consciousness is tied to some causal profile which can be exploited in certain manners of implementations of certain kinds of functional organizations (possibly manners more accessible to biological evolution - although I maintain neutrality regarding if there are non-biological manners of realizing intelligent phenomenal consciousness). You can just have a system encode some variables that track preservation parameters and make an algorithm optimize/regulate it. It's not clear why it needs to have any phenomenal consciousness (like Nagel's what it is like) for that. I think the onus would be on the other side. It could be possible, that our physical reality is such that certain kind of computational realizations would end up creating certain kind of phenomenal consciousness but then that could be just an accidental feature of the actual world rather than some metaphysical necessity.