The relationship between neural and behavioral evidence for animal consciousness is examined by critically reviewing two recent studies. One study on crows found different neural activity depending on whether a stimulus was reported as seen or unseen, but this implicates neural activity in consciousness only if a specific conditioned behavior is assumed to be a report of conscious experience. Another study on macaques recorded behaviors strikingly similar to patterns of conscious and unconscious perception in humans, yet confounds were only ruled out in human subjects, presupposing substantial neural similarity between humans and macaques.
A conscious being has a subjective point of view on the world and its own body, a concept easiest to grasp with vision, as Ernst Mach illustrated by drawing his own visual perspective. However, subjective experience encompasses far more than vision, including sounds, odors, tastes, and tactile sensations—a complete sensory world. The text argues that these sensory experiences constitute a full subjective point of view, extending beyond any single sense to shape a person's entire conscious experience of reality.