But, like you alluded to, even within humans, there is a vast range of conscious capabilities.
I'm not entirely certain that that is what was being alluded to (although feel free to correct me if I'm wildly off base). Some branches of philosophy (especially philosophy of mind, especially philosophical idealism, especially solipsism) that are internally consistent but raise the question of whether consciousnesses other than one's own exist at all.
A fairly common question, for instance, when talking about strong AI is: How can we tell if it's conscious? Since we lack any real sort of objective metric for such a thing, there are two plausible answers: 1) We ask it, or 2) We follow our gut and make a guess. Both of these answers have fairly obvious problems with them. All of those problems apply just strongly when we're dealing with the idea of animal consciousness as well, or even with the idea of anything other than oneself being conscious.
I'm not entirely certain that that is what was being alluded to (although feel free to correct me if I'm wildly off base). Some branches of philosophy (especially philosophy of mind, especially philosophical idealism, especially solipsism) that are internally consistent but raise the question of whether consciousnesses other than one's own exist at all.
A fairly common question, for instance, when talking about strong AI is: How can we tell if it's conscious? Since we lack any real sort of objective metric for such a thing, there are two plausible answers: 1) We ask it, or 2) We follow our gut and make a guess. Both of these answers have fairly obvious problems with them. All of those problems apply just strongly when we're dealing with the idea of animal consciousness as well, or even with the idea of anything other than oneself being conscious.