[wcarss]

There's some fair points here but this is much less than half the picture. What I gather from your message: "if it is built like a human and it says it is conscious we have to assume it is", and, ok. That's a pretty obvious one.

Was Helen Keller conscious? Did she only gain that when she was finally taught to communicate? Built like a human, but she couldn't say it, so...

Clearly she was. So there are entities built like us which may not be able to communicate their consciousness and we should, for ethical reasons, try to identify them.

But what about things not built like us?

Your superconductivity point seems to go in this direction, but you don't seem to acknowledge it: something might achieve a form of consciousness very similar to what we've got going on, but maybe it's built differently. If something tells us it's conscious but it's built differently, do we just trust that? Because some LLMs already may say they're conscious, so...

Pretty likely they aren't at present conscious. So we have an issue here.

Then we have to ask about things which operate differently and which also can't tell us. What about the cephalopods? What about cows and cats? How sure are we on any of these?

Then we have to grapple with the flight analogy: airplanes and birds both fly but they don't at all fly in the same way. Airplane flight is a way more powerful kind of flight in certain respects. But a bird might look at a plane and think "no flapping, no feathers, requires a long takeoff and landing: not real flying" -- so it's flying, but it's also entirely different, almost unrecognizable.

We might encounter or create something which is a kind of conscious we do not recognize today, because it might be very very different from how we think, but it may still be a fully legitimate, even a more powerful kind of sentience. Consider human civilization: is the mass organism in any sense "conscious"? Is it more, less, the same as, or unquantifiably different than an individual's consciousness?

So, when you say "there is nothing more to it, it's pretty much that basic and simple," respectfully, you have simply missed nearly the entire picture and all of the interesting parts.