I think there's a lot of homo-exceptionalism in the challenges to this hypothesis. What I mean by that is, everyone is incredulous that stones can have the sam

I think there's a lot of homo-exceptionalism in the challenges to this hypothesis. What I mean by that is, everyone is incredulous that stones can have the same experience as humans, but consider it the other way around: humans have essentially the same experience as stones. Both react to the physical processes happening at their peripheries in dynamically-consistent ways, i.e., computing a quasi-deterministic function. The conclusion then is that since we are conscious, there's no reason that stones couldn't also be. It's a matter of degree, encoded in the complexity of that quasi-deterministic function mentioned above. The main difference between us and stones is that, in order for our DNA to have arisen and propagated itself this far, it had to have a strong set of skills to survive over the history of the universe. It can literally create lumps of proteins that achieve that goal. For the body of the animal, being aware of its own history by constructing a self-consistent and closed narrative arc (the 'I' that we all contend and interact with) obviously has advantages, since it would be hard to operate in society without pre-defined and agreed-upon roles, which we assume as our identity. So the fact that we experience reality as such, with our emotional reactions and persistent self-narrative, is an evolved trait which helped the human genome become the dominant life form on Earth.