We who are prey argue consciousness because we are able to ask, "What is it like to be the hunter?" But the hunters still eat us. The hunters have a faction w

We who are prey argue consciousness because we are able to ask, "What is it like to be the hunter?" But the hunters still eat us. The hunters have a faction who agitate for equal rights on our behalf, since we feel pain and suffer, and create engines (but not interstellar ones). None of us want to tell them they are a little bit wrong in the essays, having picked up rudiments of their language and writings, even though both we and they understand calculus. Or we could tell them, and propose we are just as important to the idea of an intergalactic organization, although we do just want to borrow some of their schematics around movement and weapons. (For our protection, of course.) Therefore, the only beings a conscious folk consider likewise are those who may emerge in a fashion to make war to preserve themselves. Does that mean we should expand consciousness otherwise to species that cannot?