1—The organism must be mobile (James 1890), which would exclude plants and rocks and inanimate objects from this category.

2—The organism must be uni- or multi-cellular and eukaryotic, and dependent on oxygen to control its metabolism (Margulis 1970).

3—The organism must be able to replicate and be subjected to natural selection (Darwin 1859; Noble and Noble 2023).

4—Through its movements the organism must demonstrate volitional control and an ability to learn (Hebb 1949, 1960, 1968; Noble and Noble 2023). In short, does the brain of the organism respond to feedback from the environment and its internal state, e.g., the drive to procreate and homeostasis. In the vertebrate telencephalon, volition can be expressed as a readiness potential (Varela 1999ab). Organisms that have the foregoing characteristics range from the amoeba to the primate (including Homo sapiens) and other large-brained mammals, Cetaceans and Elephantidae.

5—The telencephalon of mammals is continuously active during waking state. The activity remains high per neuron (based on glucose consumption) to maintain consciousness, and this activity is not related to locomotion. Whether the foregoing properties extend to all vertebrates and to specific ganglia of invertebrates needs immediate empirical attention.

6—Metrics used to quantify consciousness: total amount of information stored in an organism, declaratively (i.e., in terms of sensation) and executably (i.e., in terms of body movement), and the maximal rate of information transfer internally by way of conducting neurons. Stephen Hawking had a minimal throughput of 0.1 bits per second (because of ALS), yet he could still perform internal computations.

7—Species intelligence should be based on an organism’s evolutionary presence. Crocodiles have thus far survived over 200 million years: two extinctions.

8—AI machines will never have the consciousness of animals, because they are not biological entities, and they will always need to be maintained by a human programmer/CEO—the liability holder—even if the device becomes extremely autonomous: Bezos will always be legally responsible for his algorithms, as the New York Times is responsible for what it publishes (Harari 2024).

9—And what about AI Singularity? Depending how one defines intelligence, machines are already smarter than the best Chess or Go Players, but an AI’s ability to solve problems the way humans do without having to use brute-force (namely, by way of high-energy-consuming supercomputers for back-propagated learning and massive memory storage) is yet not available (LeCun 2023), and may never be.

10—Human intelligence (not machine intelligence as suggested by Geoffrey Hinton) will extinguish humankind by nuclear or environmental annihilation or by synthesizing an unstoppable pathogen or by some combination of these (Chomsky 2023; Ellsberg 2023; Sachs 2023).