Consciousness is not the ability to respond to events. It's the ability to experience events. There are no words or tools in a universe of space, time, mass,

Consciousness is not the ability to respond to events. It's the ability to experience events. There are no words or tools in a universe of space, time, mass, and energy with which to deal with other's experience. Our language applied to other than ourselves deals exclusively with responding to events not to experiencing them. By its very nature experience is unique to each of us as individuals. Other's experience is absolutely inaccessible and not definable except by analogy with our own. It is ineffable. To otherwise define consciousness, you must intellectually reach outside the universe of space, time, mass, and energy and assume that awareness exist at an equivalent fundamental level. Assuming that awareness exists as a primitive at the quantum level, consciousness would have to be self-organizing behavior arising from an assemblage of such quantum-level primitives of awareness. Consciousness, then, must have evolved in step with biological evolution and all species resulting from biological evolution are conscious to a degree. I don't see any other way to look at this. Well, I know what I meant, even if what I've written is confused. : )