Animal consciousness, or
animal awareness, is the
quality or state of self-awareness within an animal, or of being aware of an external object or something within itself. In humans,
consciousness has been defined as:
sentience,
awareness,
subjectivity,
qualia, the ability to
experience or to
feel,
wakefulness, having a sense of
selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind. Despite the difficulty in definition, many philosophers believe there is a broadly shared underlying intuition about what consciousness is.