Corals have no heart to pump blood through vessels, no elaborate digestive system, no lungs, and no eyes or ears to serve as external sense organs--and they have no neurons massed together in one core location, or, in other words, no centralized nervous system, no brain. Even brain coral only has the outward shape of a brain and does not possess the organ it is named after. Along with certain other oceanic creatures--and it is an animal if it does not produce its own food as a heterotroph--a coral polyp has only a "net" of nerves diffused throughout its body, similar to a jellyfish, a fellow member of the phylum Cnidaria.
As a colonial organism, coral polyps can live together in groups of hundreds or thousands. They can individually react to stimuli, such as by using their nematocysts (the stinging cells they share with jellyfish) to catch prey. Even if conscious, coral does not necessarily have the capacity for elaborate recognition of logical truths, prolonged introspection, or layered emotions. Perhaps it would have more of a simple passive perception of exterior stimuli. Still, it is seemingly the most simple creature that does have a nervous system, and any sort of reaction to stimuli at all, and the presence of neurons, suggests but does not prove that it is conscious (one would have to be telepathic/omniscient to know this).
Observation of the animals in the natural world already shows that many of them, from birds to sharks to salamanders to lions, really do appear to have their own consciousness just as I do. Even the sea sponge, with its utter lack of both a brain and any nerve net [1], reacts to stimuli and is classified as an animal. If it truly is the case that these beings are conscious, as observational evidence points to, then it is not just a logical possibility for a physical being to have consciousness without a nervous system or a particular kind of nervous system, but there would be many animals that already exemplify how a brain is unnecessary to have a mind.
Coral, with their simplicity that puts them just above sea sponges on the spectrum of neural and general biological complexity, would be among these animals. As bizarre as the nervous system of coral or other some other kind of sea life might be compared to the neural networks of most surface organisms, it is not just one animal beneath the ocean waves that displays this distinction. Multiple kinds, with varying shapes and sizes and other biological features, can be encountered that have no central nervous system whatsoever. Cnidarians like coral and jellyfish are some of the most well-known of these creatures.
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