Great read, thank you. This may be my favorite topic. I write mostly fiction and I love it when I can explore these issues in fiction.

If our experience exploring the rest of the natural world provides a precedent, then not only is the nature of consciousness is more complex than we presently imagine, but our place in it is not so special. You suggest (in a response to a response?) that examining the brains of living creatures suggests a kind of hierarchy of awareness. Most dog owners would insist that their pets possess self awareness, but then we could be fooled by dogs’ close attention to our behaviors using acute olfactory and aural inputs that we can only imagine. We know that our fellow humans are conscious only by analogy. We cannot directly experience their minds any more than we can experience a dog’s mind, but we have reason to believe that the inner life of other humans closely resembles our own. Experiments have shown that apes experience resentment.* What other human like qualities exist in the simian mind, or in the minds of “lower” creatures? Could there be consciousness entities right under our noses that we don’t even recognize because the mode is so different from our own, such as insect colonies or plant communities?

We thought that the earth, our home, was the center of all, but as we grew in knowledge we learned that not only is our precious planet a mere speck, a mote in something unimaginably huge, but even the stuff we are made of comprises only a small portion of that whole. Similarly, the more closely we examine the atomic and sub-atomic realm, the more it defies our human notions of cause and effect, of common sense. As we explore the nature of consciousness using modern scientific tools it seems that we are uncovering a similarly growing complexity.

*I recall reading about this somewhere. Apes or monkeys given a cucumber slice as a reward became sullen if they saw one of their fellows being given a grape for accomplishing the same task.