Well, it was just a thought experiment, since we have no way to find out. Yes, animals can learn many skills and also find surprising solutions to reach and ope

Well, it was just a thought experiment, since we have no way to find out. Yes, animals can learn many skills and also find surprising solutions to reach and open that food recipient you thought was safely locked, but there also seems to be a fuzzy limit to the thoughts available to them and it's plausible that, even given a human like level of intelligence, an average intelligent talking dog might be content to live its life in a human household with other dogs, while an average intelligent talking wolf might not. We don't know where feelings and desires come from, why somebody has a burning desire to be free or do some particular thing, while somebody else can be satisfied without freedom if their basic needs are met. Many people are preoccupied with AI these days, and most seem to consider consciousness as something that emerges from intelligence on a gradient, if they ever think about it. To me, consciousness looks more like something complementary to intelligence. In principle, wouldn't it be possible for an artificial system to be intelligent and react to its environment without having any feeling or experience about it, just by being trained to successfully respond to its survival challenges and perhaps be able to repair or construct copies of itself? Is there a survival advantage in being able to experience life? Doesn't it just needlessly complicate things? For some unknown reason, I find myself wondering about this from time to time.