I think you are overthinking things. Of course most of the human beings on planet earth do not perform some kind of philosophical analysis. However most peopl

I think you are overthinking things. Of course most of the human beings on planet earth do not perform some kind of philosophical analysis. However most people actually have an intuition of what it is like to be human and apply it unconsciously to everything that they encounter. I posit that a significant part of that is “acts like a human acts in such-and-such situation” and, inferred from that, “experiences things like a human”. When I look at my fellow human beings (hell, when I look in the mirror), I have no objective knowledge that they are conscious. If I were to encounter someone badly injured it might not even be clear to me that they were human, much less conscious- so I use observations of behaviors and reactions to put $NEW_THING into the right ontological bucket. My bucket for “mosquitos and other pests” is absolutely inappropriate for humans; but it is interesting to me to know whether things belong in some bucket that deserves special treatment. The last few years has seen a lot of research (some of it obviously animal rights activist driven) into consciousness of arthropods and mollusks. I read a couple of the papers to understand what was being measured and how, and now I’ve moved lobsters into the “should be killed humanely before cooking”, where I would put cows and chickens etc. I think most people, if they were given this kind of information, and if they were economically able to act on it, would make similar choices.