ABSTRACT
Consciousness is a notoriously elusive notion, in part because it points to a cluster of related phenomena (see Van Gulick, 2014, for a broad overview; see Godfrey-Smith, 2016, and Trestman and Allen, 2015, for discussions of this issue in the context of the evolution and phylogenetic distribution of consciousness). My target notion is subjective experience – having any experience at all. This is sometimes called the ‘phenomenal’ or ‘phenomenological’ notion of consciousness. When I am aware of anything at all, I have an experience, and I am the subject of that experience. That experience is what it is like to be me in that given situation, the ‘experiential quality’ of my existence in that moment. If there is something it is like to be a given creature, that creature is conscious. Which animals are conscious in the sense of experiencing their presence in the world? How can we tell?
