I have one problem with consciousness is everywhere argument. Namely, if everything down to ants is conscious - how lucky are we to end up experiencing the world as humans? The chances are just too small for me to accept it at face value.
I think its best answered with a few related questions to consider what makes us lucky:
1) Longevity clearly matters, but the relativity of it is hard to assess: some sea mammals with emotionally-rich lives live twice as long.
2) Quality of life clearly matters. It's easy to imagine (and hopefully you personally know some!) pampered pets who have it unbelievably good: tasty food and nutrition, regular fun exercise, a fulfilling social and family life, a sense of purpose, etc.
And on the other end of the spectrum:
3) There are untold numbers of us who pulled the short straw in life and have lives marred in tragedy and suffering -- if they even are "lucky" enough to live long enough to comprehend it.
I think some of us are incredibly lucky and very much in the minority. The "luck" spectrum in life is so both deep and wide that I'm perfectly happy accepting "consciousness is everywhere" in order to focus on the question of what to do with the consciousness (and unfortunate lack of it at times) I have.
What I am surprised about is not how sentimentally lucky I am, but how unlikely it is that my consciousness (which by the theory of consciousness being everywhere) ended up in the being that we consider to be "most conscious" (human). Even if I lived a very short life full of terror and pain - I still would be just as surprised that consciousness that could have been "planted" anywhere ended up in me - a human. And so the alternative theory of "only humans have consciousness" would be more attractive.
Personally, I find it astonishing that anyone could draw a line at humanity. For example, have you never bonded with a dog before? It's so blazingly clear that while there are obvious differences there are even more similarities behind how they think and feel. It's not just dogs: cows, pigs, and rats -- if you spend any time with them -- are obviously high on the spectrum. It's unfathomable that the line of consciousness is anywhere near being at humans alone.
My intent isn't to be insulting, but inviting! There is much splendor in connecting with non-human life, even if it doesn't have all the same qualities as human life :).
Or stated a bit fancier - the p-value of the null "consciousness is everywhere" is astronomically small, given this observation of me ending up as a human.
Ants might be conscious but that doesn't mean that they count as anthropic observers.
The probability that you are someone who is capable of asking the question you've asked is 1.
The chances that the matter you're made of ended up making you is astronomically small compared to it just being random space dust or something. And yet it happened.
I think it's just selection bias.
The matter I am made of is nothing special - everything has same kind of matter so I am bound to have some of it. But the consciousness I have is very special - top shelf in all of biology.
Say bacteria are conscious. Here is how special this is: the number of bacteria on earth is estimated to be "five million trillion trillion". And there are ~7 billion humans. So the chance that I randomly end up as human, instead of bacteria is ~ 0.0000000000000000000001. And that is disregarding all other creatures.
Try to see it from this perspective; your experience as an individual (soul) is a feature of the structure we call Homo sapiens. It's a characteristic of this species' brain structure, in the same way that the colors of a flower are characteristic of its phenotype.
It would be silly to ask, "What are the chances that that shade of yellow ended up on that particular daffodil?"
The notion of "you" being in a "body" is extremely difficult to shake. Even if it's intellectually approachable, understanding it intuitively is something else entirely, though certainly attainable through sustained meditative practice or a hearty dose of psychedelics.
The fact that I am "seated" in a human body is an argument for only humans having this feature or phenotype called consciousness, and against the "consciousness is everywhere".
But this is not what is happening. What is happening is more like you finding three tickets under your rug in the morning, checking the numbers and finding out that you won jackpots in all three, and then choosing to believe that they are winner tickets by chance (believing in consciousness is everywhere) as opposed to someone planting them there (only humans are conscious or some other similar explanation).
The key difference between the two is that in the second case there are no multiple possibilities - it's about one person - you, you either win or loose, so we cannot select "winners" after the fact in this case.
What you're saying is that panpsychism implies a lower probability of you ending up as you, because you may have ended up as a conscious bacteria instead.
I'm going to tentatively disagree with that because the counterfactual of you ending up as a bacteria instead of a human is impossible, and therefore it doesn't factor into the probability estimates. Whether a bacteria can be conscious is besides the point. I may be committing some kind of Monty Hall fallacy, but don't currently think so.
The Veil of Ignorance is false if we're talking about physical reality.
Sadly I don't remember the name of it, but this argument about consciousness is in the same fashion. Except the odds are a _lot_ more surprising when compared with the population argument.
Doesn't this logic also imply that solipsism is true? 1 observer is less than 7 billion observers and therefore more likely under the logic of the Doomsday argument.
And I do see how this can lead to solipsism. In particular when combined with "Self-Indication Assumption: The possibility of not existing at all" [1] . Solipsism would be a theory that explains both - the doomsday original argument and this criticism.
But I haven't thought much about that.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument#Self-Indicat...
Mere phenomenal consciousness is anywhere _in living creatures_ so that even a bacterium can be said to be conscious (it reacts to light sources, for example, and is able to detect nutrients).
I like how you clearly define these differences. But tow do you know other creatures are not meta-conscious?
Long answer: there is a plausible argument that consciousness might be a gradient. Certain creatures might express some level of meta consciousness, yet still far from what humans can do. For instance, elephants, primates or even just a dog might express some sort of empathy or more subtle mental states that do not equate with the experience itself, which would be mere phenomenal consciousness, but they do not appear to articulate to themselves those mental states and do anything more than simple reactions with those states.
Ultimately the claim comes from empirical observations: there's an immense evolutionary gap between humans and everything else, so that we can plausibly claim that we are the only fully meta-conscious creatures.
Probably anything that self replicates and has to fight for resources. Even a cell can have perception and behaviour. It's actually fascinating, but a network of DNA and proteins can function like a neural net inside a single cell.
The chance of being and ant or a human is the same....
And maybe one aspect of human consciousness is ants thinking, "hmm what are these large things that seem to leave sugary refuse in their wake?"