askchapo

Sure those behaviours are observed. But what specifically makes you think consciousness is likely? Obviously we can't measure consciousness at this point, (or perhaps ever it's quite unclear) but most people fall somewhere between "brains do it" and the more chauvinistic "human brains do it".

This isn't really something you can talk about particularly scientifically, the closest to that is basically that we observe that in humans people report modifications to consciousness if you dick with their brains and we tend to avoid wanting to overcomplicate hypotheses with second order things until necessary. We can then try making comparisons between human brains and non human brains but it's all very speculative.

You can assume behavioural complexity requires consciousness but it's pretty vibes based and drawing lines is hard. Most people also seem to not ascribe say complex algorithms, bacterial colonies, or water cycles or whatever consciousness though.

So I'm curious where you fall. Personally I don't think pan psychism is woo but I don't subscribe. Stuff just is conscious doesn't seem any more or less reasonable to me than a lot of other "stuff in this particular arrangement just is conscious" type hypotheses, especially when humans can have all sorts of modifications to their brains and continue to describe being conscious (p zombies???).

I don't want to bait, I'm genuinely interested although personally consider myself more of a fence sitter on non animal sentience. Suspecting it's less likely but of course unprovable one way or the other atm.