Watching an ant or a spider, any insect or similar kind of creature you are immediately aware that the same life is present as there is in you, a life that deals in matters present before itself for the sake of a future and whose precise patterns of behaviour express both an ontogenetic and phylogenetic past. This issue of whether consciousness is present or not is immaterial. It might be or might not be, but only as something potentially emerging from life itself. The question of consciousness, seen as determining personhood etc. is somehow entirely the wrong question.