I just got to thinking what an amazing thing consciousness is when something dawned on me. Consciousness is basically an atribute of an existence that has found itself some free time. All the glories of our culture. . . our art; literature; music; techology. These are the existential footprints of a species who calls itself concious; a species who has so mastered its skills of survival that it is afforded some breathing room from which it may enter the creative process and create novel experience.
Our brains grew to enourmous proportions relatively quickly. This reflects a time period when our ancestors had found themselves able to devote more and more of their brain's processing power on simply imagining things. And the result is all we have today!
So something conscious is something that can imagine, and something can imagine when its entire being isn't wrapped up in trying to survive. That doesn't sound all too hard. If the universe is abundant with life -- which is pretty much a given imo with all the organic compounds they keep detecting in exoplanetary objects and deep space -- then maybe it's teeming with an orchestra of imaginations
