Fair enough! We share most of our view of what's what, and differ mainly in interpretation. For what it's worth, I consider consciousness to be a capability, l

Fair enough! We share most of our view of what's what, and differ mainly in interpretation. For what it's worth, I consider consciousness to be a capability, like the ability to digest cellulose or to echolocate; and I consider it to exist on a continuum, with us humid beings being the most capable (that we know of) and unicellular microbes arguably the least. And the degree of capability looks to be strongly related to the complexity of a living being's brain (or what passes for it - microbes cogitate, in a very dim but adequate-to-their-needs way by discharging and detecting chemicals in their protoplasm). From all the examples we're aware of, it appears that consciousness is a process, what brains do, kinda like a flame is what a candle does. We've only ever (reliably) observed the phenomena we associate with consciousness in living brains. If we work hard enough at mimicking brains in silicon, we may one day see consciousness in man-made machines. I, at least, have a lot of trouble imagining that consciousness can arise independently of structures painstakingly evolved in that direction or even more painstakingly constructed. Humans pay a huge price for their capable brains - the difficulty and risk of childbirth, the prodigous consumption of (I think) one-fifth of the body's energy. If consciousness were something lying around elsewhere, evolution would not have needed to take this costly route. That's me, science and reason talking. Of course there's always a possibility we're surprisingly wrong about this.