Thanks to Hofstadter’s epic ramble I’m comfortable with consciousness as the quality of any system that contains a representation of itself. At the primitive extreme you may have a program with a single bit state representing “I”, and, via a worm with a few neurones and your very personable dog, to you, gentle correspondent, at the other extreme, modelling these existential meta-matters in your meatstate.
What really cooks my noodle though is the experience of continuous self.
