Thank you for your thought-provoking answer! You're arguing that consciousness is to be understood as a consciousness of the self (and its environment). That i

Thank you for your thought-provoking answer! You're arguing that consciousness is to be understood as a consciousness of the self (and its environment). That implies that there can be intelligence that is not conscious, right? About the missing sensation of the field of rocks; How about adding some sensors to the system, so depending on measurements like temperature, one could move a certain designated stone, which could then be taken as input by the rules moving all the other stones. Would that change alone yield consciousness? Also, how many different types of such sensations are needed to produce consciousness? Humans sense quite a few different types of such input data, but we can't sense everything there is to be sensed. In your last two paragraphs, I believe you state that consciousness is just the (mathematical) reflexivity of "thoughts" (i.e. representational processes concerning objects). That's an interesting thought I've pondered as well, but doesn't that just move the problem to whether machines can produce such thoughts? Certainly they can produce representations of thoughts, but do they really think them?