serves no role

consciousness, like the appendix, serves no role, but to make us sick - Alexandre Vialatte

as quoted in Consciousness and the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene

on pp 244-245 he writes:

I would be very surprised if none of them [animals - vs] shared at least part of our conscious experiences.
...
For instance they [monkeys - vs] can be rewarded to press one key if they see a light and another if they do not. This motor act can then be used as a proxy for a minimal "report": a nonverbal gesture equivalent to animal saying "I think I saw a light" or "I didn't see anything."

funny thing is we can teach a computer to do that even easier than any animal. A computer can actually say "I think I saw a light" in human voice in any language, so no proxy whatsoever would be required. I wonder if Stanislas Dehaene would agree that this computer shared at least part of our conscious experiences.