Alien emergent phenomena

This is something that's been on my mind for several years, although I've had trouble pinning it down as a concept and communicating it, but here's a shot.

All of this is of course completely speculative, and there's no way (that I know of) to settle it so far, this is simply complete speculation within philosophy of mind.

Some background: I see the hard problem of consciousness as perhaps a qualitatively different kind of problem, one that doesn't positively benefit from analogies to “élan vital” or some other mysterious answer to a mysterious question. I am a hopeful physicalist, and I am very open to the possibility that future humans, and especially a digital superintelligence, would be able to unravel the mystery of the hard problem, but I remain unsure. If I were to bet on one thing not yielding to systematic attempts to understand and fully explain it, it would be qualia. I'd like to think that eventually the mysterians will be refuted, and retrospectively we will regard the concept of there being a “hard problem of consciousness” as confused thinking, in the same vein as other jumbles of the map and territory. Alas, I am uncertain.

So here the idea: is it the case that there are essentially two phenomena in the universe: ordinary matter, and consciousness/presence of qualia? (I don't feel confident enough to commit to one specific theory of philosophy of mind, be it physicalism, emergentism, epiphenomenalism or dualism, but for present purposes, just assume I mean something roughly common-sensical when I say that matter and qualia are two distinct things). Or could there be a third (or more?) category of phenomena that is possible? Could it be the case that there's some kind of emergent phenomenon, that we could not locate in mindspace,

yet is nonetheless not inanimate, but that shares none of the properties of what we would call consciousness? So, the closest you could get to describing it would be to say that, in some sense, the lights are on, but it is not inhabitable by any agent in mindspace, as it is by definition not to be found in mindspace, in the same way that cousciousnesses can by definition said not to be non-conscious?