He can speak for himself, so I'm not interpreting him here, but:

This was an excellent article. To me "consciousness" cannot be thought of as binary, i.e. humans have it, no other creature does. That's the classical, religious view.

Rather it's just an illusion your brain puts on for you, and rabbits get a different illusion. So it's silly to say "animals are more conscious." They have a different consciousness. Go ahead and google "what is it like to be a bat."

Honestly, I thought your view was the default of most people?

Maybe, but oceans of ink over the millennia have been spilled on the question of "how does mind differ from matter?"

Maybe you're right and we're beyond all that.

The author isn’t trying to answer a philosophical or scientific question, but instead just commenting on how we often have aesthetic views of consciousness. So just like he feels like the man on the subway is conscious due to his expressed emotions, he also feels like the rabbit is conscious due to the liveliness of its movements. That’s contrasted with his own view of himself, which while ironically he knows he is conscious, he feels his lack of vigor is a huge limitation.

Just shitposting:

How about “the number of bits a subsection of a system is able to encode about the rest of the system surrounding it”

I appreciate about HN that your, fairly amusing comment is "shitposting." :-)

Ah, but what about the subsections of the subsections? And so, ad infinitum? Eventually you'll need something like the exclusion postulate of Integrated Information Theory

Isn't consciousness the feeling of existing?

Well the problem is that science makes predictions, and that is all.

If we want to talk scientifically about consciousness then we need to be able to make predictions about it and test those... then refine our ideas.

Up until that point its metaphysics or religion. Do I agree that rabbits are probably somewhat conscious? Yes. Do I know what that MEANS? No.

That's self-consciousness or self-awareness, a bit different thing, the next level for winners of the mirror test.