What is "having a consciousness"?

Personally, I think smart animals must have some kind of mild consciousness, but it's not nearly as developed as ours.

Also, isn't the guy in your avatar ex-prime minister Drees?

Oh goody. I am taking a class in university called psychology of consciousness so I can speak with some legitimacy on this issue. I also wrote a paper comparing the more philosophical views of consciousness to the scientific ones if you would like to read it.

In any case, no one agrees on what consciousness really is. The best definition we have is that consciousness is subjectivity, sort of, "what is it like to be a bat." We have no idea what it is to be a bat and it is impossible for us to know. Also this generalizes to a human level because you have no idea what it is like to be me, and I have no idea what it is like to be you. Sure you can describe it to me but that leaves something out, the "youness" of being you.

Take for example we have a colour blind person who can't see red. They can come to us and say, "I know what red is, I know the wavelengths which correspond to red, how the rods and cones in our eyes make red, and so on." But this colour blind person is missing something, the redness of red. He can not see red so he can not experience it. This is what my consciousness is like for you and vice versa.

Personally after studying the subject I have come to the conclusion that our consciousness is really an illusion. It's really the by product of all the other systems which operate within our body. Memory, emotion, sensations and so on. Our brain has to organize these systems into a coherent and unified function and it is from that illusion of unity which consciousness emerges from.

Well in order to get that subjective experience, "What is it to be like X." That X needs to be self organizing. So I think consciousness at some level needs to be self organizing. Meaning that it is about to turn massive amounts of environmental input and organize it in a way that allows that "X" to be able to exist on it's own in the world.

Unfortunately computers are no where near this level yet. They don't even have the functions of your basic house fly. A fly can sustain itself in the world, make sense of environmental stimuli it receives and so on. Machines need us to input stimuli into it and then organize it. While we are getting closer and closer to that point machines still aren't able to make sense of their environment and exist independently of us.