While I agree that this is the case for many animals, I would say that consciousness and emotions are two largely orthogonal things. Certainly consciousness is conceivable without emotions, and having emotions without consciousness also seems plausible. You can have fear and distressing pain without a reflective awareness of being a self with those feelings.

Yes, that is the definition of consciousness (you care about them).

I notice certain philosophers seem completely baffled by anyone being interested in the "hard problem" of conscious and things like qualia. A good example is Daniel Dennet. He seems to understand what qualia is but can't seem to understand why there's anything unique about the phenomena. I also see similar opinions expressed here in the comments. I've often wondered if a certain portion of the population are in some sort of philosophical zombie state and they equate consciousness with simple things like being awake and able to respond to stimuli.

Its unprovable and a meaningless concept. There is no observable evidence that can distinguish so called "p zombies" or so called "real persons". Might as well call it a "unicorn in space" or anything else meaningless.

I can live with that.

I think that Jimmy Carr has it right: AI is the fourth great humiliation.

Regardless of whether something is concious, we're not going to be (by lay definition) the smartest entity on earth.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/gRgoIVnjkVU

>and thus a Godless understanding of how it works

We don't even have that much. Though, some people certainly think they do.

This doesn’t make sense at all.

I think people like this are mixing up the hard and soft problems of consciousness. The soft problems are things like figuring out what causes the brain to be awake, retain memories and respond to stimuli. Those can all be all be approached in a scientific way. The hard problem, as far as I can tell, is still far out of reach of scientific understanding.

There’s over 400 years of philosophical debate about consciousness starting with Locke, shifting with Kant, and continuing onward with real world implications throughout. By some more modern definitions an iPhone has consciousness while others explicitly exclude certain humans, and these definitions served as part of the justification of slavery and sexism, colonialism and more. I started writing an essay on this on my phone in response and I gave up there are so many examples.

To name a few you may want to investigate:

John Locke, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, David Hume, G.W.F. Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, William James, Edmund Husserl, Sigmund Freud, Thomas Nagel, Ned Block, David Chalmers, Giulio Tononi, René Descartes, Daniel Dennett, Julian Jaynes, Michael Graziano, T.H. Huxley, Otto Weininger, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, John Searle, Christof Koch, Bernard Baars, Max Velmans, Victor Lamme, Stanislas Dehaene, Antonio Damasio, Anil Seth, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Galen Strawson, Philip Goff, Colin McGinn, Patricia Churchland, Paul Churchland, Frank Jackson, Jerry Fodor, John Stuart Mill, Wilhelm Wundt, Franz Brentano, Carl Jung, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault.

The Turing test comes to mind. It no longer being the gold standard for thinking machines.