So I am not sure how we can start to address the issue, we equate self awareness with conciousness- lately 'self awareness' in the form of recognizing yourself in a mirror has been used as a benchmark... This seems silly to me- so far chimps, elephants and dolphins have succeeded in this test, but does it really mean anything? I had a cat and put a mirror in front of it- the cat was totally oblivious to its image and showed no interest whatsoever- it seems to me that the experiment showed nothing about the cat's awareness- maybe, for cats, the image of a cat is NOT the thing that identifies cats, or itself, in its mind- maybe its smell that matters...

Essentially, we define intelligence as 'how like a human' an animal is- this is obviously flawed. As a kid we had a dog- a mongrel, really- that really seemed to earnestly believe that it was going to be a human someday- he exhibited shame when he knew he did something wrong (often we only knew he did something wrong because he was acting ashamed), he demonstrated pride when he thought he did something right, and he LOVED to pretend and play games- that seems like pretty complex self-awareness to me, but he never showed interest in his reflection as far as I know...

In winter, his favorite game was attacking and killing us kids- we would be wearing our thick coats and so he could snarl and bite (all the while wagging his tail) without worrying about hurting us- we would play like that a few minutes (he was ALWAYS careful not to bite an unprotected area- again that takes intelligence) and then he would become very meek and tentatively offer his paw to 'shake' hands- once we shook, he knew it was still all just play and the battle resumed- that seems like intelligence to me. He was very protective of us kids- I once played dead one winters afternoon- I laid still in the snow, he was very upset, he sniffed my face repeatedly and kept trotting off to find someone- when he found no one he came back and did to me what he did to himself, he started to gently chew the ice from my mittens/paws- that showed not just self awareness, but empathy for others... He showed such joy when I finally 'revived', and I think he got a very special meal for dinner

A while back I went on a whale watching tour off cape cod- it was neat seeing the whales, but something unusual happened- our tour was forced to take a lot longer than usual- apparently the whales had organized a human watching tour for that afternoon. One whale got up beside the boat- touching the boat- it rolled on its side and looked up, with its huge eye looking at the people looking down- you really were left with no doubt that it was studying us- our boat couldnt turn on its engines for a long time since the prop's could injure the whales coming up to study us- it actually became a little creepy... I was maybe 18 at the time, but I could tell that eye was studying us- it was curious.... that seems like something approaching sentience to me...

So maybe intelligence is more complex than simply being 'like a human'- will we be able to recognize intelligence when we find it?