Are you sure you want to conflate awareness, perception, experience and consciousness like that?="Terrapin StationIt's an umbrella term for all mental activities, including awareness, perception and experience.
I think that we have no idea what mental phenomena might be like for a corvid, and anyone who says they do have a good idea of that is full of crap. All we can do is study them from a strong behaviorist perspective and remain "agnostic" about what, if anything, their mental phenomena might be like.
How could they seem to do that? Any seeming there would have to be empirical evidence of mental activity qua mental activity, but if it's that, there's nothing unconscious about it.
I mean when a honey bee goes off in search of flowers and nectar and returns to the hive and indicates the location with a dance? Is it conscious? Is it aware? Does it have perception? Is it having an experience? I would say all these terms have slightly different meanings and connotations and conflating them like that obfuscates rather than clarifies or differentiates. Perception (touch, hearing, taste, smell, sight) all seem fairly widespread in nature. I suspect you notion of “consciousness” is a little more constricted but maybe you are a panpsychist?
Well it is true we do not have access to any other species subjective internal experience. We can take a strictly behaviorist approach in science (since science is empirical and observational) but don’t we have more license in philosophy. Rational speculation based on behavior, anatomy, neuroscience, functional MRI, etc. Can we not speculate like Nagel “what is it like, to be a bat, a tiger, etc.”. If other animals have rods and cones in their retina can we not speculate they “see” colors and even what colors they can see? Or if they have similar midbrains that on functional MRI activate similar areas (to human brains) under conditions of fear, anger, affection can we not rationally impute “emotions” and sentinence to them. Does it not seem more likely than treating them like automatons?
What about all the visual and auditory processing (vibrations of the tympanic membrane, or photons striking the retina?) which eventually results in “seeing” a flower, or “hearing” a bird sing. I mean we are completely unaware of all the steps involved in between (are these not mental or psychic activities or operations)? How about visual agnosias (where it can be shown some part of the brain recognizes and responds to the familiar face) but the subject denies conscious recognition? Surely many mental operations are sub or unconscious. In fact I think consciousness is like a searchlight fixing a focus on a small part of perceptual input and representing a small fraction of brain activity (mental operations) take are taking place simultaneously.