In Shelly's story, the monster did manifest feelings of fear, love and sorrow. It seems to me that there can be life without consciousness, e,g bacteria, but can there be consciousness without life? Is there a rational basis to Animism?

I think he's limiting his view. It's an intrinsic property of matter and energy. Like matter and energy it can be neither created nor destroyed.

That was one of my favorite episodes of ST:NG, Mike. Thanks for posting it. Why aren't there shows like that on TV anymore, instead of the senseless drivel of "reality" TV and inane "talk shows"? Did you ever read or see Copek's 1921 work RUR? It introduced the word "robot" and portrayed them as sentient.

Both are reduculous.

This is exactly what came to mind when I read the question.

In her Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, focusing on human consciousness, Ayn Rand defined consciousness as "Consciousness is the faculty of awareness—the faculty of perceiving that which exists".

Perception is integration of sensations and does not require concepts. Concepts are integrations of perceptions:

from http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/percep...

VOS: "The higher organisms possess a much more potent form of consciousness: they possess the faculty of retaining sensations, which is the faculty of perception. A 'perception' is a group of sensations automatically retained and integrated by the brain of a living organism, which gives it the ability to be aware, not of single stimuli, but of entities, of things. An animal is guided, not merely by immediate sensations, but by percepts. Its actions are not single, discrete responses to single, separate stimuli, but are directed by an integrated awareness of the perceptual reality confronting it. It is able to grasp the perceptual concretes immediately present and it is able to form automatic perceptual associations, but it can go no further."

IOE: "Although, chronologically, man’s consciousness develops in three stages: the stage of sensations, the perceptual, the conceptual—epistemologically, the base of all of man’s knowledge is the perceptual stage.

"Sensations, as such, are not retained in man’s memory, nor is man able to experience a pure isolated sensation. As far as can be ascertained, an infant’s sensory experience is an undifferentiated chaos. Discriminated awareness begins on the level of percepts.

"A percept is a group of sensations automatically retained and integrated by the brain of a living organism. It is in the form of percepts that man grasps the evidence of his senses and apprehends reality. When we speak of 'direct perception' or 'direct awareness,' we mean the perceptual level. Percepts, not sensations, are the given, the self-evident. The knowledge of sensations as components of percepts is not direct, it is acquired by man much later: it is a scientific, conceptual discovery."

From http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/concep...

Romantic Manifesto: "A concept is a mental integration of two or more units which are isolated by a process of abstraction and united by a specific definition. By organizing his perceptual material into concepts, and his concepts into wider and still wider concepts, man is able to grasp and retain, to identify and integrate an unlimited amount of knowledge, a knowledge extending beyond the immediate concretes of any given, immediate moment.

"In any given moment, concepts enable man to hold in the focus of his conscious awareness much more than his purely perceptual capacity would permit. The range of man’s perceptual awareness—the number of percepts he can deal with at any one time—is limited. He may be able to visualize four or five units—as, for instance, five trees. He cannot visualize a hundred trees or a distance of ten light-years. It is only his conceptual faculty that makes it possible for him to deal with knowledge of that kind."

So she regards sensation as a lower form of consciousness, which she mentions but normally did not discuss, ordinarily focusing on human consciousness as the basis of her epistemology and ethics (and therefore rights). Percepts, for creatures who have them, are an integration of sensations, and the human form of consciousness further integrates percepts into concepts as our unique form of apprehending reality.

If sensors feeding input into a computer are regarded as a primitive form of consciousness (like an insect), it still has nothing to do with human consciousness with its ability to automatically perceive, and to choose to focus, abstract, and form concepts as the means of our understanding unattainable by lower life forms. A computer can be programmed to combine sensor inputs to automatically make deductions analogous to automatic percepts, but has no conscious awareness, no free will, and no mental integrations of conceptual understanding.