One response is to abandon the attempt to capture what it is to be human in an aphorism, and to accept that we are animals that differ from other animals only by degree, and not on account of some sharply unique property or characteristic that only humans can possess.
I think this is the ground truth, that there exists a scale , and size / taxonomy isn’t always predictive.
The implications of this from an ethical perspective deeply call into question out overall ethical framework, and I’m not talking about only the way we treat animals. I suspect there are fundamental structural problems with our entire ethical scaffold from the foundational level.
I think this is the only obvious and correct conclusion to any of this, it would be stupid to assume there is some magic "level" you "achieve consciousness" with.
Why not, if consciousness arises from some sort of brain activity? It would mean you need a nervous system that can produce that activity. It would also mean you need a nervous system, which many organisms do not have. Some animals have a nervous system, but no brain.
