The first paragraph is…
A man believed to be on drugs was shot and killed Monday by Florida sheriff’s deputies who had tried to shock him with a Taser as he wielded a set of garden shears shortly after he was apparently bitten by an alligator in a lake, a sheriff said.
…the most Florida Man thing I’ve ever read.
Curt Connors has entered the chat.
Was it a radioactive gator?
“The Pitt” covered this history well.
Excerpt: …but also in plants, bacteria, and even atoms…
Hm. 
It’s not really a new theory.
Consciousness doesn’t have a firm definition so you can attribute it to whatever you like, but if you attribute it to amoebae building shells you’re not going to be referring to the same concept as other people. Sure, they have a rudimentary response to their environment, but not really more than people in states we call unconscious. That’s got to count as some kind of baseline, right?
Along those lines, some people attribute animals’ ofttimes “human-like” behavior purely to instinct, as if that disqualifies said animals from admittance to Club Consciousness, as if a large range of our own behavior is not also driven by instinct.
Buddy was a good boy girl!
Girl.
Like everything else, “consciousness” (IMHO) exists along a continuum. On one end is “avoid pain, don’t die” while on the other is contemplating eternity in a grain of sand. In my lifetime, the list of beings we recognize as “conscious” has gone from us and maybe apes to include pretty much all mammals, most birds, fish and reptiles, some invertebrates amd arguments about protists and even plants. But it is not a binary thing. I can buy avoiding pain and death as a form of consciousness, along a continuum. I suspect pretty strongly that we are not nearly as far advanced on that continuum as we like to think.
Living things are all descendants of the same common ancestor, and we ourselves grow anew from a single cell, so I don’t see how it could be anything but a continuum. But imagining a sharp cut off and declaring single cells to be conscious are both attempts to collapse that into a binary. It’s a human word for what waking humans are like – of course we should expect nature to be full of things that exhibit some aspects of it but not others.
Indeed. I sometimes think we may actually be the very stupidest aminal.
Humans are far more cooperative than most animals, but this also allows us to compete in destructive wars on scales far beyond them. In the same way I would say we have gotten good enough at thinking to have unlocked whole new levels of mistakes. 
And the cruelest.
