I don't think that meat is the deciding factor. I simply don't know what the deciding factor is, but only animals seem to have consciousness. I say "seem" but o

I don't think that meat is the deciding factor. I simply don't know what the deciding factor is, but only animals seem to have consciousness. I say "seem" but only in a philosophical sense. Of course we can't really tell if an animal is really feeling things or is just and advanced robot/zombie with no internal experience. It's just that given what we know about the world and ourselves, it seems absurd that only I have internal experience, so unless I want to be overy hubristic, I must grant that other people have it too. Since other people have it too, there's no reason to think that animals don't have them. Plants on the other hand are very different kinds of biological machines, so we can't really say anything about them. It's possible that other kinds of entities can have self awareness, and it should be obvious that some kind of computation is a pre-requisite for that, but it also seems absurd to assume that it is sufficient.