Comment by mat0

You can touch an animal and it will react to it. Why are you putting language in front of it? Or let’s put it this way, what though you need to think before you feel something is interacting with you body? What you define as consciousness, having a theory of mind or any kind or inner monologue is a very small subset of what consciousness is. And I’m not talking about some pseudo esoteric hippy thing here. I’m talking about what Tomas Nigel was talking about many many years ago https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Nagel_Bat.pdf