All we know about animal consciousness is limited to behaviour, e.g. the subset of the 40 or so "consciousness" definitions which are things like "not asleep" or "responds to environment".
We don't know that there's anything like our rich inner world in the mind of a chimpanzee, let alone a dog, let alone a lobster.
We don't know what test to make in order to determine if any other intelligence, including humans and AI, actually has an inner experience — including by asking, because we can neither be sure if the failure to report one indicates the absence, nor if the ability to report one is more than just mimicking the voices around them.
For the latter, note that many humans with aphantasia only find out that "visualisation" isn't just a metaphor at some point in adulthood, and both before and after this realisation they can still use it as a metaphor without having a mind's eye.
> Language is the baseline to collaboration - not intelligence
Would you describe intercellular chemical signals in multicellular organisms to be "language"?
> We don't know that there's anything like our rich inner world in the mind of a chimpanzee, let alone a dog, let alone a lobster.
If be "we don't know" you mean we cannot prove, then, sure, but then we don't know anything aside from maybe mathematics. We have a lot of evidence that animals similar consciousness as we do. Dolphins (or whales?) have been known to push drowning people to the surface like they do for a calf. Killer whales coordinate in hunting, and have taken an animus to small boats, intentionally trying to capsize it. I've seen squirrels in the back yard fake burying a nut, and moving fallen leaves to hide a burial spot. Any one who has had a dog or a cat knows they get lonely and angry and guilty. A friend of mine had personal troubles and abandoned his house for a while; I went over to take pictures so he could AirBnB it, and their cat saw me in the house and was crying really piteously, because it had just grown out of being a kitten with a bunch of kids around and getting lots of attention, and suddenly its whole world was vanished. A speech pathologist made buttons for her dog that said words when pressed, and the dog put sentences together and even had emotional meltdowns on the level of a young child. Parrots seem to be intelligent, and I've read several reports where they give intelligent responses (such as "I'm afraid" when the owner asked if it wanted to be put in the same room as the cat for company while the owner was away [in this case, the owner seems to be lacking in intelligence for thinking that was a good idea]). There was a story linked her some years back about a zoo-keeper who had her baby die, and signed it to the chimpanzee (or gorilla or some-such) females when it wanted to know why she had been gone, and in response the chimpanzee motioned to with its eye suggesting crying, as if asking if she were grieving.
I probably have some of those details wrong, but I think there definitely is something there that is qualitatively similar to humans, although not on the same level.
> If be "we don't know" you mean we cannot prove, then, sure, but then we don't know anything aside from maybe mathematics.
More than just that: we don't know what the question is that we're trying to ask. We're pre-paradigmatic.
All of the behaviour you list, those can be emulated by an artificial neural network, the first half even by a small ANN that's mis-classifying various things in its environment — should we call such an artificial neural network "conscious"? I don't ask this as a rhetorical device to cast doubt on the conclusion, I genuinely don't know, and my point is that nobody else seems to either.
> We don't know that there's anything like our rich inner world in the mind of a ...
I posit that we should start with a default "this animal experiences the world the same as I do" until proven differently. Doctors used to think human babies could not feel pain. The assumption has always been "this animal is a rock and doesn't experience anything like me, God's divine creation." It was stupid when applied to babies. It is stupid when applied to animals.
Did you know that jumping spiders can spot prey, move out of line of sight, approach said pray outside that specific prey's ability to detect, and then attack? How could anything do that without a model of the world? MRIs on mice have shown that they plan and experience actions ahead of doing them. Just like when you plan to throw a ball or lift something heavy where you think through it first. Polar bears will spot walrus, go for a long ass swim (again, out of sight) and approach from behind the colony to attack. A spider and the apex bear have models of the world and their prey.
Show that the animal doesn't have a rich inner world before defaulting to "it doesn't."
> I posit that we should start with a default "this animal experiences the world the same as I do" until proven differently.
As I don't know, I take the defensive position both ways for different questions.*
Just in case they have an inner world: We should be kind to animals, not eat them, not castrate them (unless their reproductive method appears to be non-consensual), not allow them to be selectively bred for human interest without regard to their own, etc.
I'd say ditto for AI, but in their case, even under the assumption that they have an inner world (which isn't at all certain!), it's not clear what "be kind" even looks like: are LLMs complex enough to have created an inner model of emotion where getting the tokens for "thanks!" has a feeling that is good? Or are all tokens equal, and the only pleasure-analog or pain-analog they ever experienced were training experiences to shift the model weights?
(I'm still going to say "please" to the LLMs even if it has no emotion: they're trained on human responses, and humans give better responses when the counterparty is polite).
> How could anything do that without a model of the world?
Is "a model of the world" (external) necessarily "a rich inner world" (internal, qualia)? If it can be proven so, then AI must be likewise.
* The case where I say that the defensive position is to say "no" is currently still hypothetical: if someone is dying and wishes to preserve their continuity of consciousness, is it sufficient to scan their brain** and simulate it?
There are some clever tests described in The Language Puzzle on primates that (paraphrasing 14 hour long audiobook so forgive any mistakes.) indicate no primate other than humans and a couple of immediate predecessors (based on archaeological evidence) have much in the realm of abstract thinking abilities using their own communications, a few primates raised and taught forms of human language cannot progress very far without any of the facilities of language present in normal two-three year old development. The book is focused on how humans evolved language so other species are not covered, there is obvious verbal and gesture based communication in primates but it concludes not enough of the components of physiology that enable human language are present(both brain and vocal anatomy).
All we know about animal consciousness is limited to behaviour, e.g. the subset of the 40 or so "consciousness" definitions which are things like "not asleep" or "responds to environment".
We don't know that there's anything like our rich inner world in the mind of a chimpanzee, let alone a dog, let alone a lobster.
We don't know what test to make in order to determine if any other intelligence, including humans and AI, actually has an inner experience — including by asking, because we can neither be sure if the failure to report one indicates the absence, nor if the ability to report one is more than just mimicking the voices around them.
For the latter, note that many humans with aphantasia only find out that "visualisation" isn't just a metaphor at some point in adulthood, and both before and after this realisation they can still use it as a metaphor without having a mind's eye.
> Language is the baseline to collaboration - not intelligence
Would you describe intercellular chemical signals in multicellular organisms to be "language"?