Maybe not intelligence with conceptual capabilities but what about direct experiencing or witnessing? For every one of us, animal or human, we start primarily a

Maybe not intelligence with conceptual capabilities but what about direct experiencing or witnessing? For every one of us, animal or human, we start primarily as an experiencer of reality, then as we grow we build a model of the physical world and how we relate to it. But that "subjective" experience is primary, and our model of reality, materialist or otherwise, is conceptual and inferred and secondary, including the idea that our firsthand experience and bodies are one in the same.