I think it’s important to think of consciousness as a spectrum. Having studied artificial life, the conclusion I came to is that something needs to be situated

I think it’s important to think of consciousness as a spectrum. Having studied artificial life, the conclusion I came to is that something needs to be situated and have some degree of nervous system to be conscious. A rock is not concious, but a tree might be. A fly is less concious than a dog. A robot may be concious if it has enough sensors to react and significantly change it’s behavior due to processing (rather than simple bump or range sensors acting as limiters). But really at the end of the day, it’s sort of a bullshit word people tend to use to imply that humans are somehow special beyond just having an insane number of neurons pound for pound.