On Consciousness

Perhaps the first order of business for a conscious being or system is self preservation and avoidance of damage.

In the simplest system the only requirement is a detector. Such consciousness would be unobservable unless it includes an ability to respond in some manner. An example of a simple system would be a light detector which upon detecting light would turn itself ‘off’, perhaps by temporarily closing an aperture to the detector. I think that this could be the most primitive consciousness … a detector and a response to something detected.
Now, what I think of as self-consciousness is a huge order of magnitudes in complexity beyond this.