I submit that there is a difference between me and a corpse. Or between a steak and a cow in the field.

"Well, okay, you're just (living) flesh on bones." There's a difference between me and a zombie (or, if you prefer, brain-dead me). There's a difference between me and lab-grown organs [1], or even between me and my kidney cut out of me.

> It’s not even an interesting question.

Consciousness is an active area of research (ergo, interesting enough for some people to devote research to it): biologically [2] and philosophically [3].

Unless you enjoy nihilism, there are some serious problems with materialism (that is, matter is all that there is), which we are encountering. There are also some philosophical problems with it; a cursory search turned up this journal article [4].

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8889329/

[2] https://www.nature.com/subjects/consciousness

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness

[4] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/philosophy/article/a...