My hunch is: there’s a low-grade subjectivity/qualia to all of the universe, which would include the particles of the rock, but the rock would not experience an independent “rock-ness”.
The consciousness of organisms are perhaps more like a dissociative state, analogous to a gravity well of subjectivity, such that the qualia are concentrated inside a boundary (the entity that is intelligently chasing energy differentials), and excluding most information outside this boundary.
The primary reason for this hunch is that “ouch” is an experience, rather than merely a mathematical/algorithmic update to a neural net (compare with artificial NN’s, chemical feedback loops, etc). An “ouch” is not needed to strengthen the signal; just tilt the training feedback stronger as necessary (-10,000 points to “eat the berry that made us sick”). And it seems prohibitively expensive expensive to bootstrap “strange loop” subjectivity merely to strengthen those numbers via an “ouch”.
But instead, if some form of subjectivity were to pre-exist, Darwinian pressures would co-opt it as an efficient feedback loop mechanism, and then iterate until arriving at the “consciousness” of animals and humans (including an incentive to pay more attention to qualia in the organism boundary, and only minimally outside it)