> If consciousness is simply what occurs when you combine senses with the ability to reason and a concept of self
It's possible that you are missing some number between 1 and 10^12 components of consciousness. You can experience for yourself that your own consciousness is not simply composed of your senses, self, and reason through meditation. The initial realization is that the majority of your thoughts are not produced by any of those faculties and seem to arise on their own. So right there you have something not in your list which is pushing fully formed thoughts into your awareness. Pay close attention to your internal state and you soon find that thoughts, sensations, and emotions are happening concurrently and often compete with each other for attention. So this seems to indicate that there are a multitude of processes driving these. Thoughts can even compete with each other for attention so there is seemingly not a single origin for them. Finally, beyond all of that there is definitely something else that I can only describe as a sense of being or what it feels like to simply exist that undergirds all of that mental activity. It's the thing that remains when you take away or look past the other activity and it's always there since with practice you can switch to attending to that sensation at any point. I often wonder if that feeling is what it feels like to be a much simpler organism.
It's possible that you are missing some number between 1 and 10^12 components of consciousness. You can experience for yourself that your own consciousness is not simply composed of your senses, self, and reason through meditation. The initial realization is that the majority of your thoughts are not produced by any of those faculties and seem to arise on their own. So right there you have something not in your list which is pushing fully formed thoughts into your awareness. Pay close attention to your internal state and you soon find that thoughts, sensations, and emotions are happening concurrently and often compete with each other for attention. So this seems to indicate that there are a multitude of processes driving these. Thoughts can even compete with each other for attention so there is seemingly not a single origin for them. Finally, beyond all of that there is definitely something else that I can only describe as a sense of being or what it feels like to simply exist that undergirds all of that mental activity. It's the thing that remains when you take away or look past the other activity and it's always there since with practice you can switch to attending to that sensation at any point. I often wonder if that feeling is what it feels like to be a much simpler organism.