A warning about 'model welfare'

> But it’s pretty obvious that humans are the superior species evolutionarily in that we’ve essentially dominated the planet.

That in itself is an anthropocentric viewpoint. I'm sure an eagle watching down, seeing a human running around, could easily consider humans as quite inferior as they are so slow and restricted to 2d movement. The shark that sees a swimmer at the surface, struggling to stay afloat and unable to breathe under water may surely assert its superiority over such primitive beings. It all depends on the metric you use, and we obviously pick the metric that makes us shine.

On the moral side, few eagles, or bird species, have exterminated other species. Much less knowingly out of greed. Oh but that's different? Sure, if you ignore what makes humans look bad, morally. No surprise humans come out on top then.

> And on some level, are beating evolution itself (by fixing genetic issues and helping the “least fit” to survive and reproduce.)

That's a quite narrow viewpoint as well. Evolution is in full swing, just not in the "smarter/faster/taller/stronger" sense that a naive view of it would make you expect. "Fitness" is a concept relative to the existing conditions, and if the conditions make it easier for teenage cancer patients to reach reproductive age, then that's just less of a fitness disadvantage. Doesn't mean evolution stops.

There are various flavors of pan-psychism (and the "consciousness-first" idealists, who think that Mind is a substrate below Matter). There are some who claim that it goes all the way down, that even subatomic particles experience a micro-consciousness (and we can't rule it out, even as I share your skepticism).

One common confusion (IMO among critics and supporters alike) is to say something like "a rock experiences rock-ness". But this suffers from a compositional dilemma: does half of the rock experience half-rock-ness? If we flipped a coin for every atom, do the heads-flip rock atoms have their own experience? If we pick two rocks at random, are they experiencing two-rock-ness? It gets silly fast.

This is one thing that fascinates me about "ontology", simultaneously an inquiry into categories, and Being. It bewildered me at first, that it seemed to be doing double-duty on two distinct subjects, but I now see that the two are inseparable, that Being is in part defined negatively (apophatically), by the boundary that separates the Being from its not-Being.

My intuition on the nature of consciousness, is that it's something akin to a field which permeates the Universe, and that biological systems adapted to leverage that field, acting like a gravity well that concentrates subjectivity in one place, drawing a boundary (event horizon?) around experience, in a way that a rock doesn't. My ancestors could have avoided fire with "-X utility points", and sought food with "+X utility points", but it turned out to be more efficient to adapt with "fire ouch, food yum". And in zero-sum competition (predator/prey dynamics), each organism has an incentive to avoid leaking its subjectivity into another's.

It's far from a full theory, but it's the best I've got. :)

I think there are two parts to the question. One is that assigning machines to the category of conscious as it is usually understood would result in many problematic things (things that would be bad for people and animals fwiw).

The other is that binary "is it conscious" is a poor way to the question "should we assign societal right to this sort of entity/creature". We humans should conserve animals because we have intimate, natural relations with animals and plants, not because they satisfy the binary of conscious or not. Removing invasive species is an ethical things as well as allowing one sentient non-human to eat another sentient non-human animal. Any "conscious machine" we might create by accident would be an alien entity akin to extremely invasive organism relative to human and non-human life and so it would be irresponsible in the extreme to create such a thing.

And it's inevitable that people will try to deal with these issues using the confused category "consciousness" and so it's better to just "no, not conscious, no".