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We need to ban the word "conscious" until people can agree on what it means.

That being said, its obvious to me that many animals have similar emotional complexity to humans, and many outperform humans on some cognitive tasks.

Humans have complex language, and that's about it, to separate us from other animals.

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> We need to ban the word "conscious" until people can agree on what it means.

In modern philosophy, it ultimately mean self-awareness, if i read Chalmers correctly. Which is hard to prove (we do have mirror tests that only some animal pass, which prove they do have self-awareness, but failure to understand it doesn't mean the animal isn't self-aware, as young children also sometime fail the mirror test when left alone in front of it).

I had understood it was nociception as it relates to a physical property

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nociception

There is a philosophical definition. Our sensations which make up perception, dreams, imagination. Or subjective experience.

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