Abstract: Phenomenal awareness the basic, selfless kind of consciousness must involve discernment among states of affairs: "this, not that" rather than simply "this" (which would be meaningless on its own). Furthermore, such discernment must be intrinsic to the system: the distinctions among states must arise from its own dynamics, rather than through outside interpretation. These two considerations suggest that basic consciousness, with or without a self-model, may amount to dynamic autodiagnosis: a process whereby the system tells apart its own states, such that distinct ones result in qualitatively different state-space trajectories, as dictated by the system's dynamics. Accordingly, our Dynamical Emergence Theory of consciousness (DET) defines the amount and structure of phenomenal experience in terms of the intrinsic topology and geometry of a physical system's collective dynamics. In particular, we posit that distinct perceptual states correspond to autodiagnosed coarse-grained macrostates reflecting a self-consistent partitioning of the system's state space, a notion that aligns with several ideas and results from computational neuroscience and cognitive psychology.