I assume then your answer to my veiled question is yes, you do subscribe to mind-body dualism. Again, if I equate moral status of human consciousness to that o

I assume then your answer to my veiled question is yes, you do subscribe to mind-body dualism. Again, if I equate moral status of human consciousness to that of inanimate things, it does not need to mean I am downgrading the former as opposed to upgrading the latter. I don’t really accept physicalism myself (but neither I do dualism). I also think you have missed the part regarding wildly different or simply foreign scales. Weather adapting to trees may just be like you adapting to an earthworm while driving a car. Striking a stone, no more than a fly briefly landing on you. Bad analogies but I can’t think of a better one in the moment. I suggest not to take it literally (stones are living, hahah) but analyze it philosophically. To a degree this may require accepting that the model of reality and three-dimensional space/time accessible to human mind may always be fragmentary and incomplete, optimized towards fitness and survival at human timescales.