For example, you know those little robotic vacuum-cleaners that run around the floor? When you first look at them, they often seem like little animals, because you can sort of project mental explanations onto them: they're running around 'looking for' dirt, then they bump into objects and run away, etc. But before long we realise that all their behaviour can be explained by a handful of rigidly applied rules programmed into them, and we don't think they're conscious.

I think you admit something similar when you suggest that anthropomorphic gods are a result both of a positive tendency to understand things by analogy with ourselves, and also of “lack of physical explanation”.

Re. the Turing test, I don't think this is a big issue, but I would say that there is a kind of movement there in the changing patterns of words on the screen – there's changes, and we ask ourselves 'what's producing those changes'?

So I guess what I'm now thinking is that there's a sort of 'competition' for the explanation of any given change/movement/event/behaviour by either a law-like 'physical' explanation, or an analogy-with-myself 'conscious' explanation. What about when neither is possible? I'm not sure – maybe the idea of the 'beyond', the 'mysterious', is in some sense an intermediate concept between physical and mental? I do think though, this still leaves the same basic problem that I described: both forms of explanation are potentially very flexible – we can formulate and adopt the general principle that even things we cannot concretely explain in physical terms work in physical ways that we don't ye understand, and correspondingly we can suppose that even behaviours we don't understand (i.e. that make no sense) are still in fact the results of consciousness. Given that, their respective spheres seem potentially ill-defined – hence, the 'problem of consciousness' in modern philosophy.

“Though the ancients had much to say about mental matters, it is less clear whether they had any specific concepts or concerns for what we now think of as consciousness.”

This makes sense to me. Prior to Descartes, there wasn't this big idea that the physical and the mental are alien to each other, that water and rocks are to be explained in terms stripped of any suggestion of consciousness – one ancient philosopher (Heraclitus?) described atoms as being moved around by their mutual 'loves' and 'hates'.

I'm afraid I still don't feel you've defined consciousness – for one thing, the two things you mention look different to me. I think a mongoose (or me when I'm half-asleep?) has a first-person view on the world, and 'phenomenal consciousness', but hardly any self-awareness.

There are countless videos featuring animals and Roombas: Roomba vs. Rabbit, Roomba vs. Cat, Roomba vs. Dog and so on (even babies!). Roombas are autonomous robotic vacuum cleaners that bear no resemblance to animals in shape or form. And yet they are paired with animals to observe “unanticipated relations” (I think this speaks to the spectacular power of contingency that I mention in my post). Replacing the robotic dog for the roomba suggests that there is a desire to pair animals and machines (because machines are always animal-like?) more generally and I think that tells us more about human beings than non-human animals.