Okay, here's my thing. Where does life begin? I don't mean reproduction. I mean you have some chemicals in water. They bounce around, reacting with each other for millions of years. At some point they self organize. Why? Like where was the tipping point? The molecules carry out functions, completely without intelligence. They have no brain, they're just abiding chemistry/physics. The molecules get with other molecules. Then you eventually get a single living cell. Where is the line between life and inanimate objects in that scenario? Carry that on to multi-cellular life. If you're a single-celled organism, you can draw the line at yourself. You can say that everything that isn't you isn't quite alive and everything that is you or more is alive. But that's arbitrary isn't it? Why do you get to draw that line and why is the place you draw it better than any other place?

So do all that reasoning but with consciousness. Why is human-like consciousness the benchmark other than it's just what we prefer it to be? A dog is conscious. Even by mainstream science and non-vegans they're just as aware and intelligent as human children. They don't reason like we do though. They don't conceptualize stuff like we do. To be hungry, tired, scared, happy, etc all mean different things to them.

Consciousness is unfalsifiable, so relying purely on inductive means seems sloppy. Could you ever really know if a dog is conscious even if they could speak a human language? Is there really any measurement you could make? It would all be dismissed as Chinese Room stuff. But what if, just for the sake of argument :expert-shapiro: we aren't actually the benchmark for universal intelligence. What if things are aware in ways we can't possibly measure or understand with only calipers?

I'm not a scientist maybe there are answers to all I just asked. At some point it's possible, if improbable, that consciousness emerges without it being human or part of our evolutionary history.