the belief that animals are conscious is a somewhat recent development isn't it? being able to feel hunger or pain doesn't make something conscious at least not in the same way humans are. a fly is capable of being hungry and will react to pain but I don't think it's capable of self reflection.

there might be some merit to his point though I doubt anyone considering that whales might be highly intelligent and conscious beings while they were being hunted for oil.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_consciousness

People mean different things when they use the word "conscious", and that's part of the problem that keeps cropping up in these debates. I was using it in the most basic meaning, the one that "unconscious" is the opposite of. Someone who's asleep or knocked out is not conscious; when they wake up they become conscious again. Almost nobody denies that animals have this: they can fall asleep, and when they are awake they are conscious in the sense of being able to see, hear, taste, experience pain or pleasure, and so on. For the sake of avoiding ambiguity, I will call this "awareness" in the rest of this comment rather than "consciousness".

Other people use "consciousness" to mean self-awareness, the capacity for what is called "higher" thought, the ability to reason and philosophize and so on. It used to be nearly undisputed that animals do not have this, and even though more people today would claim that animals do have this state, that remains a minority position. (And I do not believe it, BTW). Again for the sake of avoiding ambiguity, I'm going to call this "self-awareness" for the rest of this comment.

I read this guy's article thinking that he meant "awareness" when he wrote the article — and his paragraph about Descartes's Cogito, ergo sum definitely is talking about awareness. The ability to experience qualia: the color red, the feel of heat, and so on... that's awareness. Experiencing those things does not mean that you have self-awareness: it is pretty widely accepted that animals can also experience sight (at least those with eyes), the sensation of heat or cold, and so on, but few serious thinkers would argue that that alone proves that animals have self-awareness the way humans do.

In fact, looking through the article, I still cannot find a single place where he uses the term "conscious" or "consciousness" to unambiguously mean "self-aware" or "self-awareness". Throughout, he seems to be talking about the ability to experience sensations, and perceive the world, the thing I've called "awareness".

And yet... if that's his meaning, then his thesis (that "care confers consciousness", as he phrases it in the paragraph that starts "An obvious worry follows") is staggeringly stupid. Because as I've said many times, and I don't think anyone would disagree with me, everyone believes that animals can experience sensations. Which makes his thesis obviously incorrect.

The only way I can rescue his thesis from the garbage dump for obviously-wrong ideas would be to assume that he meant "self-awareness" when he talks about consciousness. In which case his "care confers consciousness" line means something like "when we care for other people is when we start to treat them as if they were human beings, not mere meat-robots". Which would be a point that could be sensibly argued. I would still disagree with the thesis, mind, but it wouldn't be obviously staggeringly stupid.

But if he intends the word consciousness to mean "self-awareness" throughout, then his paragraph about Descartes is just plain wrong, because it is arguing about consciousness by listing off qualia, sensations (redness, heat) that you experience by perceiving the world through your senses. Those are the factors that make up awareness, not self-awareness.

One possibility remains: that he is sometimes using the word consciousness to mean awareness, and at other times using it to mean self-awareness. In which case his argument rests on calling two different things by the same name and hoping you don't notice. This is called equivocation, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivocation has an excellent example (in the "Fallacy of four terms" section) of why equivocation leads to bad reasoning, usually without realizing it.

No matter what, whether he means awareness throughout, self-awareness throughout, or he's equivocating, his article is bad reasoning.