What is it that gives people a consciousness?

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You can get into that stuff - away back in the day, I concocted a beautiful web of theory that started from the definition of a space-time point as the set of all possible consciousness transformations involving that point, which seemed to me to be a transfinite quantity. Lasted me for decades, once it had absorbed and recrystallised the mythologies of kabbalah, astrology and ritual.

The test, though, is whether or not the theory makes any difference in reality. Obviously, a faith in any theory provides a leverage towards action in some direction, but once you filter out the "getting along with people" effects there's not often a lot of evidence that anything really changed. Between epigenetics, chaos theory, and the half-second gap, I wound up in the end with two alternative sets of theory - one that started from the deist side and the other from the purely materialist - and was eventually unable to distinguish any difference between their outcomes. The childlike belief in god that had sustained me through half a century of unfortunate outcomes evaporated like frost in the sunshine.

that is a good observation.

the description or attempt to describe consciousness does intersect between biology and philosophy.

the study of biology isnt called applied chemistry even thou cells are made up of atoms and only atoms.

the study of psychology and neurology isntt called applied biology even thou the brain is made up of cells.

the study of conciousness cannot be classified into a biology/ philospohy section as the study even thou thought is believed to originate in the brain.

here in the gaps in between you have the " emergent" phenomenon...not a noun..emergence is a description of something entirely different that defies philosophical or biological classification.
a bottom up system where the resultant has greater quallitative descriptions than the observed constituent parts.

The fact that they are conscious of their consciousness makes them conscious... according to Sartre at least.