Once we’ve imagined the atoms-arranged-chairwise, that’s all it is to be a chair. It’s analytic. But there’s no such conceptual connection between neurons-instantiating-computations and consciousness, which arguably precludes identifying the two.
That’s true. The difference between chairs and consciousness is that chair is a 3rd person concept, whereas consciousness is a 1st person concept. Imagining a world without consciousness is easy, because we never know if there are consciousnesses or not in the world—consciousness is not an empirical data, it’s something we speculate other have by analogy with ourselves.
Of course, being apreciated for what you do is important because goals are mainly social features. Having a goal for oneself and only oneself is simply absurd: when you die it’s all gone. Nobody wants to achieve something that he/she can’t share with others because everyone knows that someone alone counts for nothing.
So there is no problem here. You always work for gratitude, but unless you are a very cynical person, you’ll always want to deserve that gratitude for real, and that’s the most important here.