Is anybody out there?
The funny part is, even when such a question is answered, you still can not know for sure if you are just a brain in a vat and fed with a fabricated stream of data, or if the outside world is real and other beings do exist. I choose to believe the former, but there's no way to know if the outside world exist.

At a certain extent, mind is a continuous projection, a simulation based on the past experiences and guided by the datastreams coming from the senses.
I'm convinced a lot of what we consider conscience is in fact simulation based on assumptions. Saying this because of the many examples of perception illusions, mostly visual illusions, but there are auditory illusions, too (e.g. Shepard Tone illusion). These illusions show that we don't really perceive what is out there, in the objective reality, but rather we perceive what we think it's out there. We also continuously adjust the simulation to what is really out there (based on what we see and hear and touch, etc.).
We continuously simulate the world (I think) because it gave an advantage. At first it was just to improve the reaction time to external threats, then later the simulation ability also came handy for planing. The simulation doesn't have to be perfectly tuned to reality (that would require too much processing power), fortunately it's enough if the brief simulation we are able to do is adjusted to the sensory datastream we receive. So we simulate first, then we hit the closed glass door, then we see the glass of the door, in this order.

What we call seeing and perceiving is mostly simulation. Remember that test with people passing a wallet from hand to hand? At first I didn't noticed the obvious, because I was simulating in a different direction. The culprit was not limited attention.
Same idea of mind as a driven simulation also explains how that the dreams during sleep are so strange. Because the mind continues to do its thing, to simulate the world and adjust the simulation to the input datastream, except this time the sensory datastream is replaced by random noise.
A good definition of self awareness would be, IMO, the ability of a NN to do driven simulations.
By this criteria, most of the animals are sentient and self-aware, which is also my belief. AFAIK there is no agreed technical definition for what conscience or self awareness means. I think this definition could be a good one. If a NN can do driven simulations (driven by some input datastream) then it's just like us, no matter if it's made out of digital neurons or biological neurons.