The difficulty with consciousness is that nobody really knows what it is.
Though a precise definition may be difficult to agree on, that doesn't mean we have no idea at all what consciousness is. All available evidence suggests that consciousness always requires a mechanism. In humans, and other self-aware creatures on this planet, it is based on a complex electro-chemical neural network. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_correlates_of_consciousness.
It's plausible that there might be other mechanisms in the universe that manifest as consciousness, but there is no good reason to suggest that it operates anywhere without such a mechanism. Whether consciousness can manifest independently of such a mechanism has no evidentiary basis, and even if such a thing is possible at all, any similarity to philosophical guesswork would be entirely co-incidental.