Yes, but only if the premise is the assumption that consciousness is ONLY a human characteristics.
Perhaps the terms awareness and self-awareness could better be used when attempting to compare human consciousness to that of dogs, sea cucumbers and plants. Plants are known to exhibit functional awareness. Photo-tropism is one of the most basic. They are also known to employ bio-chemical communication that can produce observable responses in adjacent plants, such as in response to herbivores and parasites. (Citation needed.) But these are a long ways from language and self-consciousness. As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
I think part of the problem is we are using a term, consciousness, that we identify primarily with human beings, and are applying it to non-human subjects.
Agree. Humans tend to anthropomorphize and project which tends to make the word "consciousness" as much a reflection of the person using the word as the organism or entity being labeled. Also "consciousness" carries historic and Pop-Psychology baggage which quickly turns the conversation into a 'unhelpful' direction and area.
One can test for Awareness and, to some extent, for Self-Reference making them, in my view, more precise thus better.
Animals have a very limited ability to plan, recollect, and abstract, so we tend not to think of them as conscious.
Many Republicans also have a very limited ability to plan, recollect, and abstract, so it's not entirely clear which species they belong to.
The Sapiens part of Homo Sapiens may be unrealistically optimistic in their case.
After a while that gets to be a bit of a bore.
Or at least so argue modern ethologists, such as Frans de Waal. By laying out pros and cons we risk inducing people to join the debate, and losing control of a process that only we fully understand. - Alan Greenspan
"Quintessentially Human" stuff is dwindling all the time. Tools, for example, are used/done by spiders, sea otters, chimpanzees, octopi, and other species with varying degrees of cognitive ability, adaption of the tool, adaption to the tool, etc. etc. The one thing Humans can do that other animals don't, to the same degree, is our complex social groupings used to allow us to exist in a diverse range of ecological niches.
