[ShellfishMeme]

I would rather assume that basic consciousness is a property of a certain kind of computation over time that keeps state in a way that allows you to experience the events of the world as a continuous process and track your state in it over time.

Of course one could say that the way that is implemented for us is using matter. Then again one could argue that all matter is just a manifestation of a huge amount of computation.

So we are just computers built on a substrate of manifested computation, and we built even more computers ourselves that way.

Thus I'd argue that anything that can compute and keep state can have consciousness. How intelligence fits into this all, I am not sure.