> and maybe dogs because we like them but definitely not spiders and flies because we don’t This is not an intellectualy honest way to put it. Dogs are obvious

> and maybe dogs because we like them but definitely not spiders and flies because we don’t This is not an intellectualy honest way to put it. Dogs are obviously and objectively more psychologically complex creatures than flies. "Liking" them has nothing to do with it. People generally like butterflies more than rats, yet hardly anyone would deny that rats are more conscious than butterflies nevertheless. Just because consciousness is not a binary thing (either on or off) doesn't mean it can't exist at all. It can be a spectrum. > My personal experience is that consciousness, like free will, is a useful illusion. Poking at the edges of consciousness (mostly with drugs) leads to all sorts of contradictions and challenges to what people usually think of as consciousness. I could use the same argument to state that mountains are an illusion. And then it's also kind of true. After all, you can't clearly define what constitutes a mountain (what's the minimum height? And what's the reference point, who says it must be the sea level? etc.), or show me precisely where a mountain starts and where it ends, without having to use some criteria of purely arbitrary nature, under which what you consider a mountain I may not, and there's no way to objectively prove who's right. But mountains aren't illusionary in the sense that a world without mountains as we know them (however imprecisely) wouldn't be identical to ours. So they are something.