What Is the Actual State of Consciousness?

What is the actual state of consciousness? How do you know when your consciousness is being taken place? Is consciousness a physical or nonphysical method? Does it require a certain technique or are you just born? These are simple questions that are asked everyday in our society today. Consciousness is the fundamental fact of human existence, from the view point of persons examining their own experience. There are various aspects of consciousness, such as perception, mental imagery, thinking, memory and emotions. I believe that consciousness can be seen in aspects of small animals and machines. An ant for an example has a conscious mind about staying in covered areas during the rain and to panic when something attacks it. This shows memory, perception and thinking which shows that it does have a conscious. A lot of things involve having and using a conscious. Some machines have something similar to a conscious. A computer for example has a hard drive which is a lot like a "memory", in which it stores something, and it has ram, which is basically information stored and ready to be used. If I were to open a web page browser and then open up a word document, I could instantly jump back to the browser because it's stored on my hard drive, but loaded on my ram, which is a lot like remembering things doing your childhood. For example elementary school, it might have been a long time ago, but the memory of elementary school is still fresh in our mind, and we can go back and instantly load it up with less difficulty than the first time.