"I wasn't conscious when that or this happened" implies that consciousness is just perception. Neutrinos fly straight thru our bodies, but we don't perceive tha

"I wasn't conscious when that or this happened" implies that consciousness is just perception. Neutrinos fly straight thru our bodies, but we don't perceive that, so we aren't conscious of that reality. We can be conscious of our thoughts or not, the latter means our attention was elsewhere. Following this logic, all animals are conscious. They can't reason, but that's an addon to consciousness. Btw, imagine your mind as a standalone reasoning machine: you tell it a situation and it models the outcome. This machine can reason on its own, passively wiretapping sensory inputs and modeling outputs in your memory, all without your involvement, and whayever it models will be simply ignored, as your attention would be elsewhere. In other words, the thinking process would carry on unconsciously, just like your heart's activity. However, the moment you pay attention to those thoughts and start steering the thinking machine, this process becomes conscious. A creature equipped with such thinking machine, but without anyone steering it, would be a zombie.