One could imagine that human’s would appear unconscious to a hyper intelligent alien species. Perhaps it’s all relative.
One is the experience of qualia, and the ability to hold preferences.
The other is the behaviors associated with making predictions and intentionally manipulating the world to achieve tasks.
We have a hyper-intelligent chess engines that cannot be argued to be conscious. We also have small mammalian minds, like Koalas, that are dumb as a brick, but are very likely conscious.
A rock for example is below that threshold. The question then becomes what exactly is the minim level of perception we are willing to accept. Individual cells respond to their environment indirectly, that’s enough to qualify IMO but I accept people would disagree.
Which just illiterates people don’t generally use philosophical definitions directly. What they mean by qualia isn’t subjective conscious experience, it’s something else which they can’t actually describe that just so happens to conform exactly to their preconceived notions.
It’s like the flaw in that “Chinese room” thought experiment. The person following instructions isn’t the room any more than the walls are. All that thought experiment demonstrates is a CPU has a more limited perspective than the computer it’s part of.
A specific rock inherently is whatever that rock is. That same rock can represent all finite messages at the same time in relation to it’s position along arbitrarily defined number lines. Nothing inherent to the rock changed as that meaning is external to it.
Temperature for example isn’t a substance. I am not saying consciousness couldn’t be a thing, but it just seems to be an assumption without justification.
As to arrangements of stuff being important, arrangement of individual pieces can make the difference between a watch and a pile of pieces or a person and a dead body. Many emergent properties depend on the specific arrangements of components.
If consciousness were simply the property of a system, then I'd assume it is effectively an illusion. I'm not sure, and I'm not saying this it would be de facto wrong, I'm just saying it's absurd for me to conceive of it this way, because if it is the case that it's a byproduct of a system, then there is effectively no self. It may be the case that that is true, bit it's useless to conceive of it.
When you see an object in reality, you're really making a series of assumptions. What you see is reflected light, and you construct a highly innacurate but useful model of what that light logically implies. Something that is external can only be perceived epistemically, as a sufficiently good guess. There's no evidence we're not in a simulation, so it's a toss-up as to whether anything physical exists at all.
Contrast the concept of self awareness. 'I think, therefore I am' is not a guess. It is a certainty, regardless of the broader context, that somewhere, something is a host to my experiences and thoughts.
Tangent: You can extend that a little bit by reasoning that you exist, therefore the things you interact with must exist as something. That doesn't get you past the possibility of the matrix, but it does escape total nihilism.
How do you know that? It’s entirely possible that a rock has all sorts going on that we just can’t detect.
Which sounds facetious, but given that we can’t even detect consciousness in humans, it seems difficult to rule it out entirely.
I watch animals very closely now and I see more all the time that they are just like me in most ways. I suppose I used to watch them as a person who eats them, and my comfort with doing so depended on not seeing them as conscious creatures like me. Now that I don’t eat them, it’s as though there are more similarities than there are differences.
I suspect if animals could speak, we’d realize they’re remarkably similar to us. This probably sounds ridiculous to many people, and would have to me once too.
A key part of this is not that I’m elevating animals’ conscience to that of humans so much as lowering humans’. We tend to think we’re exceptional, but I think our exception is probably just intelligence. The rest, I don’t know, I suspect we’re all very much alike.
That said, I agree with what you are saying. We tend to assume a bigger than likely distance between us and other animals.
Now I suppose neither of us are prepared to accept it.
Insects display unbelievable forms intelligence to anyone that pays attention.