These questions will never go anywhere because there is no good definition of intelligence or consciousness.
Consciousness though might be fully illusory and meaningless as many philosophical concepts before ultimately turned out to be.
:)
Cells are intelligent. Organs have intelligence on top of that, that cells do not have. Plants and animals have intelligence that their organs do not.
This is the real problem of intelligence, the definition one uses. It can cause them to be blind of all the things intelligence is capable of.
what do intelligence tests measure?
It's not an exact analogy, rather something to consider ...
How much momentum does a body have? You can measure it easily, just measure the velocity and the mass and multiply.
What exactly did you measure? What is the meaning of this? Nobody really knows. But we know we can measure this and it's a thing and it's conserved.
test X measures I(x) I(x) is defined as the thing test X measures. Therefore test X measures the pre-existing psychological trait intelligence.
this is absurd
The was just a vague idea that some people might have a bit more of some underspecified general quality but there never was any good idea what exactly that might be. So making a test that measures something correlated with outcomes that people associate with this nebulous pre-existing idea of intelligence is honest and fair stab at something that eluded our grasp for millennia.
Intelligence as people were talking about it before we created intelligence tests is something like atoms of Democritus. And IQs are atoms as we mesured them today.