I think Dennett responded too narrowly to the question and thus misreprested his own point of view. "A lion that talks like a human" is not a well formed thoug

I think Dennett responded too narrowly to the question and thus misreprested his own point of view. "A lion that talks like a human" is not a well formed thought experiment, since no real lion could talk like a human. A lion that that does wouldn't be like any lion we've ever seen. And if Koko could talk like a human, she too would no longer be like any gorilla we've seen. The main point of limited consciousness in lions is lost in an implausible fantastic model of a superintelligent lion that doesn't exist and never could. There's no point in extending that (lousy) line of reasoning to gorillas too. Through our experience communicating with Koko and with higher primates like chimps, we've come to understand how much 'more conscious' a chimp is than a gorilla, and how we can better assess consciousness without using language. We've seen that the chimp is aware of more of the world than is a gorilla, both inner and outer worlds -- the content of one's own mind and the minds of others. This really isn't so different from what Dennett espouses, that consciousness is a continuum that begins with a lowly few-cell organism that's aware of nothing in the universe more than a sugar gradient, and ends with another organism (man?) that's attuned to the loftiest truths and actively strives to achieve ideal/complete consciousness, or Satori. I suspect that on reflection, Dennett would not defend his own "lion-ness" argument for the same reasons you suggest. Koko is an existence proof to the contrary.