To reason about this usefully we need to unpack the numerous dimensions of intelligent living beings like humans (many shared with some animals). And realize th

To reason about this usefully we need to unpack the numerous dimensions of intelligent living beings like humans (many shared with some animals). And realize that although most of them are typically packaged together, they are not all necessarily inextricable. - Awareness of self versus other. - Core language for communicating simple information. - Simple spatial understanding - More complex spatial reasoning - Complex language and abstract reasoning. - "Feeling" anything from a body - Feeling emotions (arguably tied to embodiment also) - A constant stream of concentrated focus on relevant sensory or sometimes internal information - a state pattern that persists through time despite constituent elements being replaced (as in an organism) - or any tendency of a pattern to persist itself - etc. We can categorize these questions into things like living/non-living, different types of cognition, types of embodiment and sensory experience and aggregation/streams/management, etc. The starting point would ideally be science rather than philosophy. At least for the parts we can use science for, which I suggest is almost all of them, if we properly deconstruct loaded ambiguous terms like "consciousness".