Sensation, emotion, and reason all exist inside consciousness. The article points out that some animals seem to have great depth of emotion and sensation, where

Sensation, emotion, and reason all exist inside consciousness. The article points out that some animals seem to have great depth of emotion and sensation, whereas human consciousness often is more focused upon reason. Anyone who has lost time while driving a car while thinking about something else has experienced what the author is describing. We don’t always live in the moment — sometimes we live “in our head”. Meditation is one way that we train our consciousness to focus less on reason and more on sensation and emotion, in order to exert more control over both. So I’d agree with the author if he reframed the question as I have. But how do we know that animals, or even other humans, are conscious? The answer is in the definition: that sensation, emotion, and reason are all aspects of conscious experience. These aspects can be considered metadata that is only available to conscious beings. This metadata is most uniquely useful in social scenarios, as it is a shared dataset that enables highly coordinated and flexible social behaviors. The author mentions one of these behaviors: play. Non-conscious entities will have a harder time distinguishing between play-fighting and real fighting, and engage in play-fighting less often (if at all).