> How could that be what you meant? You laid out 2 options, and your corrected option 2 is the same as your option 1.

I don't get what you're saying. My "corrected" option 2 means that consciousness is a spectrum, that consciousness is not a binary property. A human is more conscious than a chicken, which is more conscious than an insect, which is more conscious than a bacterium, which is not conscious at all.

I don’t think the topic being discussed here is “consciousness”. Rather it is how similar an other organism seems to humans, from the point of view of a human.

The more human something looks, the more plausible it seems that the being may be conscious.

But this begs the question of what consciousness is, and is not a scientific approach.