[scarmig]

For what it's worth, I've given serious thought to whether a rock or the wind have consciousness. I rejected the idea, but it's essential for us to consider it for reasons of ethics. Consciousness is something even now we have essentially no understanding of. If we make something that mimics human behavior perfectly well and kinda-sorta parallels parts of how the brain works, it's not unreasonable to extrapolate human intelligence to it, just as we extrapolate our individual experience of consciousness to other humans. Defining consciousness to be a purely human/biological trait could lead us to do terrible things to entities worthy of moral consideration.