That's true of lots of animals though. What makes humans more conscious?

I liked the article in general, but I experienced this line as sort of "coming out of left field".

It is not clear to me that humans as a class are categorically "more conscious" than animals if we drop the definitional assumption that consciousness is largely "what it feels like to be a human from the inside" and try to give it a more cybernetic basis in arrangements of computational modules or data flows.

It seems to me like an empirical question whether there are some animals that are "more conscious" than some humans, and it seems to me that very very little of the necessary science that would need to be done to answer the question has actually been published. I can imagine science being done after we have better cognitive neuroscience on the subject of consciousness and discovering the existence of a kind of animal (octopus? crow? bee hive? orca? dog?) that has "more consciousness" than many reasonably normal humans do.

In the meantime, when I talk with people about the cognitive neuroscience of consciousness, I notice over and over how people conflate the capacity for consciousness with something like "higher levels of brain-mediated efficacy" and also conflate the capacity of consciousness with something like "moral status as a agent with interests". The "animals don't count" content comes up over and over, and has come up over and over in philosophic musings for thousands of years, and I rarely see evidence based justification for the claim.

Irene Pepperberg has a theory (which seems plausible to me) that humans use animals to such an extent that we have deeply engrained tendencies to see them as edible/trainable/killable rather than friend-able. It would actually be surprising if it were otherwise, considering the positive glee dogs and cats take from the torture and dismemberment of smaller animals. If Pepperberg is right, then there is an enormous amount of confabulated hooey in our culture basically "justifying the predation of animals by people who do not want to think of themselves as evil just because they love bacon". I'm not trying to take a position here, so much as pointing out an area of known confusion and dispute where the real answer is not obvious to many otherwise clear-thinking people.

If I saw a vegan arguing against animal consciousness or an omnivore arguing in favor of it, I would tend to suspect that they were arguing based on more detailed local knowledge of the actual neuroscience... rather than due to cached moral justifications for their personal dietary choices. Most people are omnivores and most people think animals are not conscious or morally important, so most people trigger my confabulation detecting heuristic in this respect... as you just did.

It is probably worth pointing out that I'm an omnivore I'm not trying to start a big ole debate on vegetarianism. What I'm hoping to do is simply to encourage the separation of conclusions and data about animal minds that I've marked as "40% likely to be garbage" so it doesn't contaminate very pragmatically worthwhile theoretical thinking about the nature of consciousness, morality, cognitive efficacy, and self-reflective or inter-subjective assessments of agency. I think you can say a lot that is very worthwhile in this area without ever mentioning animals. If you need to talk about animals then it is better to do so with care and citations, rather than casually in the concluding remarks.