I've owned a lot of very moody animals of all kinds in my past which make a strong case for subjective experience in advanced lifeforms. If you disregard those

I've owned a lot of very moody animals of all kinds in my past which make a strong case for subjective experience in advanced lifeforms. If you disregard those external phenomena as a simple cause-and-effect relationship without subjective experience, you could easily do the same for human beings. Most of my goals in life can be traced back to the need for food, shelter, reproduction, and lack of stress. IMO emotional capacitance is one of the leading contributors to the kind of consciousness that we feel, but is not a prerequisite for consciousness in general. It just depends on what you consider consciousness. Some people think that all orchestrated matter has a proportional level of "consciousness" related to its thermodynamic complexity arising from quantum phenomena, but without the ability to "feel" (emotional circuitry) and "think" (logical circuitry) you're hard pressed to tell me a rock is alive in any sense of the word. But an octopus? C'mon, they're contenders for #2 intelligence on the planet. If anyone has subjective experience, it's them.