Tononi's Integrated Information Theory of consciousness (IIT) doesn't start with the brain. And since its basic condition is an embedded/situated system, it has the advantage of potentially explaining larger or broader categories of consciousness. There are those, after all, who believe that consciousness is the real substrate of the universe—a more typically "spiritual" (like Krishnamurti, I hate that word) perspective—which, under the IIT, is quite reasonable (it does seem that the universe itself ought to represent, or at least contain, a limit point of integrated information, no?).