If you were strapped in chair in a sensory deprivation chamber, or blind and dea

If you were strapped in chair in a sensory deprivation chamber, or blind and deaf like Hellen Keller, and could only talk to people by microphone and headphones, but were otherwise the equivalent of a brain in a jar, you would be conscious. But absent ‘qualia’. In other words, a brain in a jar might not understand the color red but could have a verbal knowledge of it. Even memorize the color chart. That doesn’t mean you aren’t conscious.

You’re conscious because you can monitor and react to, respond to, and contemplate the stream of information that you are subject to – about the past three seconds. Consciousness is a faculty of enough hierarchical recursive memory (loops), valence that judges them, and the search for homeostasis in time and over time to determine that valence.

It’s not even complicated other than doing it in real time is biologically costly. more than 10x as costly as muscles.

That’s why the degree of consciousness of animals is roughly tue do the number of neurons and their hierarchical organization.