It would appear that there is some emergent phenomenon (consciousness) somewhere on the scale between mouse and human. This phenomenon may be triggered by a surplus of "computational resource" with respect to "body to be controlled", which I personally think is unlikely. It may be triggered by a matching of computational resource to controllable complexity, i.e. the hands and fingers -> tool use, who knows?
There is so much we don't know about cognition. For example, are Whales/Dolphins self aware/conscious? They have the requisite brain mass, if it's simply a scaling problem.
I am genuinely interested in your perspective.
I adore my dog. He shows a wide range of what I believe to be genuine emotions. But I do not think he is self-aware, and by self-aware I mean able to contemplate his own existence (and therefor lack of existence). For that matter, I don't think he ever contemplates the lack of my existence (despite feeling it when I am not around, so I am told).
Other animals then present more consciousness, like chimps, dolphins, elephants etc and would place somewhere between the mouse and humans.
I'm not saying dogs sit around quoting Kant, but they're highly social animals and I find it hard to believe they don't have some internal representation of themselves.
“Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly; Man got to sit and wonder 'why, why, why?' Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land; Man got to tell himself he understand.”
I would expect him to exhibit less reliably to stimuli. His behaviour is closer to a large switch(stimulus){} statement than the emergent behavior of human reaction to situations and stimuli.
One example: he was stepped on when a small puppy by a very old man from that point on and to this day, many years later, he has a major dislike of old people that he does not know well.
If the same thing happened to a child, I would expect the child to slowly, over time, question why they disliked all other old people when the old people they do know are kind to them. This would result in a change of behavior without someone explicitly teaching them.
The only thing that makes humans truly unique is the fact that we can store, retrieve, and process information outside our bodies. While we can question our responses, as in your example, we don't - unless we live in a social environment that suggests we should. (Not all environments do. Some actively discourage it.)
Everything else we do - solving puzzles, counting, acting socially, teaching in person, showing emotions - appears in simple forms in at least some other animals.
Going up a level, humans are actually an extremely large, planet-spanning colony organism with very limited collective consciousness. We act more like an aimless flock of birds or mound-building insects than a collective with awareness of its own planetary situation.
furthermore there is a reason why in Buddhism this intellectual thinking and questioning is considered unessential to being.
About two decades ago, I heard Rod Brooks talking about building a human brain. He'd done some good artificial insects and was big on purely reactive AI. At the time, he was promoting Cog [2], as a way to get to human-level AI in one big jump. I asked "You've done an insect brain. Why not try to get to a mouse brain next?". He replied "I don't want to go down in history as the man who created the world's greatest robot mouse." 20 years later, Brooks doesn't even have mouse-level AI, although he does have a robotic vacuum cleaner company.
A mouse has about 1g of brain mass; a human has about 1000g. But they're both mammals, with about 90% similar DNA. If someone could simulate a mouse at the neural simulation level, that would be real progress. Once you have a mouse simulation, human level is a scaling problem.
The Human Brain Project blew through a billion dollars in funding while OpenWorm is a volunteer effort. That's the real problem.
[1] http://www.openworm.org/ [2] http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/humanoid-robotics-group/cog/c...