“Either or” is too extreme. Both can be true at the same time even if at different levels of abstraction eg a table and atoms it consists of may exist at the same time. Depending on the task different levels of abstraction may be useful. It is ridiculous to claim that a table doesn’t exist just because we can prove it is made of atoms (or strings excitation—doesn’t matter here)

On the other hand, "consciousness" concept might be as much useful for modeling thinking as “the four elements” for describing anatomy (not useful at all)—and we create better models eventually.