I agree that reasoning and consciousness are different, however what I do not see being discussed by the AI research community is the necessity to define and then develop "artificial comprehension".
At this point in time, the act of comprehension is a scientific mystery.
I'd say 'consciousness' is the ongoing ever present comprehension of the moment, a feedback self conversation assessing the current situation a being finds itself. This act requires reasoning, as comprehension is the "sandbox" in which reasoning occurs.
But what is comprehension? It's the instantaneous reverse engineering of observations for verification of reality: is what I observe normal, possible or a threat? If one cannot "understand" an observation then the potential the observation is a threat grows. That 'understanding" is reverse engineering the observation to identify it's range of possible behavior and therefore one's safety in relation to that observation.
Comprehension is extremely complex: arbitrary input goes in and a world model with one's safety and next actions comes out.
