In what way do you and plants and you and the ocean 'agree'? I'm not sure how to make sense of these claims. I'm not even sure that you and the dog agree on this matter, but I can make more sense of that.
Just poking at the 'human' part of the definition.
Because if we want to ever be able to answer a question like 'does this AI system experience qualia', we need a definition that doesn't rely on 'well, qualia are a thing humans have, so... no'
When I have a social-emotional interaction with another human being, of a certain quality, that interaction produces in me the conviction that they must be really conscious, as opposed to a psychological zombie. Of course, I only personally have that kind of interaction with a tiny subset of all humans, but I generalise that conviction from those humans which provide its immediate justification, to all humanity
Which means, if there was an AI with which I could have that kind of interaction, I would likely soon develop the conviction that it was also really conscious, as opposed to a psychological zombie. Existing systems (for example, ChatGPT) don't offer me the quality of social-emotional interaction necessary to develop that conviction, but maybe some future AI will. And, if an AI did create that conviction in me, I likely would generalise it – not to every AI, but certainly to any other AI which I believed was capable of interacting in the same way
The whole idea of p zombies is that they can't be distinguished from conscious entities. Same inputs as a conscious mind, same outputs as a conscious mind, same behavior etc yet not conscious.
When I am convinced that my daughter is a real conscious person – that conviction isn't just based on dispassionate observation of her outputs in response to various inputs, it also has an emotional dimension. The thought of her being a p-zombie offends my heart, which is part of why I reject it. I haven't yet met an AI for which the thought of them lacking real consciousness offended my heart – I don't know if I ever will, but if I did, I would be convinced it was really conscious just as my daughter is.
Some will object that it is irrational to allow one's emotions to influence one's beliefs. I think they are wrong – certainly, sometimes it is irrational to allow one's beliefs to be swayed by one's emotions, but I disagree that is true all the time, and I think this is one of those times when it isn't.
Growing up, we had dogs. I had a very strong emotional bond with our dogs – so, if my emotional bonds with my son and daughter are good reasons for me to be convinced that they are both really conscious, to be consistent I'd have to say our dogs were really conscious too. And, since I generalise from my conclusion that my children are really conscious, to the conclusion that other people's children are also really conscious, I'm also going to generalise the conclusion from our dogs to other people's dogs – and also cats – I'm not a cat person, I find them much harder to relate to than dogs, but I recognise other people feel rather differently about them than I do.
So, in my mind, animals which humans have as pets, and which are capable of forming social-emotional bonds with humans, are really conscious. I'm less sure about pet species which are less social, since emotional bonds with them may be much more unidirectional, and I think the bidirectional nature of an emotional bond plays an important part in how it helps us form the conviction that the other party to that bond is really conscious.
What about ants, fleas, wasps, bees, bacteria? I don't believe that they are conscious, I suppose I'm inclined to think they are not. But, I could be wrong about that. I can't even rule out panpsychism (everything is really conscious, even inanimate objects) as a possibility. If I had to bet, I'd bet against panpsychism being true, but I can't claim to be certain that it is false.
Where do we draw the boundary then between "really conscious animals" and "p-zombie animals"? I think capacity for social and emotional bonds with humans (or other human-like beings, if any such beings ever exist–such as intelligent extraterrestrial life, supernatural beings such as gods/angels/demons/spirits/etc, or super-advanced AIs) is an important criterion – but I make no claim to know where the exact boundary lies. I don't think that "we don't (or maybe even can't) know the exact location of the boundary between X and Y" is necessarily a good argument against the claim that such a boundary exists.
