My guess is that these phenomena can exist much more generally than in the carbon-based examples we know of. As mentioned in Chapter 11, I believe that consciousness is the way information feels when being processed. Since matter can be arranged to process information in numerous ways of vastly varying complexity, this implies a rich variety of levels and types of consciousness. The particular type of consciousness that we subjectively know is then a phenomenon that arises in certain highly complex physical systems that input, process, store and output information.
