[XorNot]

It's hardly an unreasonable supposition: the one definitely conscious entities we know of are also the apex intelligence of the planet.

To put it another way: lots of things are conscious, but humans are definitely the most conscious beings on Earth.

[wry_discontent]

But that's not an answer. Why should intelligence and not some other quality be coupled to consciousness? In my experience, consciousness (by which I'm specifically talking about qualia/experience/awarenesss) doesn't at all seem tightly coupled to intelligence. Certainly not in a way that seems obvious to me.

[CuriouslyC]

I can understand what less cognizant or self aware means, but "less conscious" is confusing. What are you implying here? Are their qualia lower resolution?

[FloorEgg]

In a sense, yes.

If one is to quantify consciousness it would probably make sense to think of it as an area of awareness and cognizance across time.

Awareness scales with sensory scale and resolution (sensory receptors vs input token limits and token resolution). E.g. 128k tokens and tokens too coarse to count rs in strawberry.

Cognizance scales with internal representations of awareness (probably some relation to vector space resolution and granularity, though I suspect there is more to it than just vector space)

And the third component is time, how long the agent is conscious for.

So something like...

Time * awareness (receptors) * internal representations (cell diversity * # cells * connection diversity * # connections)

There is no way this equation is right but I suspect it's sort of directionally correct.

I'm deep in the subject but just riffing here, so take this with a lot of salt.

[inglor_cz]

Humans can reason why they are angry, for example. (At least some humans.)

I am not sure if chimps can do the same.

[noirscape]

Pretty much. Most animals are both smarter than you expect, but also tend to be more limited in what they can reason about.

It's why anyone who's ever taken care of a needy pet will inevitably reach the comparison that taking care of a pet is similar to taking care of a very young child; it's needy, it experiences emotions but it can't quite figure out on its own how to adapt to an environment besides what it grew up around/it's own instincts. They experience some sort of qualia (a lot of animals are pretty family-minded), but good luck teaching a monkey to read. The closest we've gotten is teaching them that if they press the right button, they get food, but they take basically their entire lifespan to understand a couple hundred words, while humans easily surpass that.

IIRC some of the smartest animals in the world are actually rats. They experience a qualia very close to humans to the point that psychology experiments are often easily observable in rats.