If you like the sound of that I highly recommend the Westworld reboot, but I don’t want to spoiler it.
It is also non-falsifiable since it is impossible to prove or disprove whether ancient people were conscious or not. Or for that matter whether a present-day schizophrenic is conscious or not in the same sense.
Can we even prove whether a modern person is conscious? If so, shouldn't we be able to occasionally encounter such unconscious people, either occurring randomly by natural variation (especially given how recently the breakdown is claimed to have happened), or in people who had very little contact with language (hard but not impossible to come by)?
The recent NPC meme provides an interesting answer to this question.
Isn't that just solipsism
It’s easy to imagine that somebody raised by apes or otherwise totally isolated from humans would not be conscious, but without teaching them to think consciously how could we ever know?
What did you think of Robert J. Sawyer's WWW trilogy, particularly the first book which features the bicameral mind rather prominently?