> For me it also raises the question of whether they have any subjective experience approximating what we describe as consciousness, or if the entirety of their

> For me it also raises the question of whether they have any subjective experience approximating what we describe as consciousness, or if the entirety of their life is just a long form electro-chemical reaction of deeply nested feedback loops programmed into ~55 million base pairs. Maybe they are the same thing. Adapting to the environment in order to survive is also the role of consciousness and intelligence in humans. The struggle for life provides a learning framework for the brain, and an intrinsic space of values and emotion, but for each species is different depending on their ecological niche. I often see people musing about consciousness as something supernatural (a "hard problem" for science), but forgetting to consider the formative role of the environment and the tight coupling of consciousness with goals, which are attainable in the environment. So the macro is being overlooked for the micro. We can explain much by just looking at the environment-body interaction without the need to identify the pixie dust in the brain. I think consciousness is a process encompassing the interplay between the body and part of the environment, not just the brain. We can't find it in the brain or in the neural net alone, but we can find it in a game of goal maximization of a learning agent. That would include a tardigrade[1]. [1] Aversive conditioning in the tardigrade https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6776688/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6776688/