alt Hacker NewsThe verb "chooses" here does a lot of the heavy lifting, and implies a consciusness that chooses. It's making the answer circular and it means that we are just pre-filtering the possible answers for our preconceptions.
My cat is not "less conscious" because he's choosing to sleep all day.
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Any action that can possibly have a simple explaination, it doesn't matter if it can also have a complex explaination, is immaterial.
A cat doing anything that can be explained by simple tropism doesn't prove or disprove anything, it's simply data of no value one way or the other.
The fact that you sleep and so does a cat does not prove that you are just a cat or that the cat is actually postulating about the inner life of other cats but just choosing not to ever write it's thoughts down. It's simply a silly trivial surface thing to even talk about.
If I may equivocate for a moment: your cat is unconscious, which is less conscious than wakefulness.