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When we ask if other creatures are “conscious” what I think we really want to know is this impossible question of what it would feel like to be a cat or a barnacle (or an eagle wheeling on a warm swell of air above our cities.) We can, to some degree, imagine what it might be like to inhabit the bodies of other living things, but to experience their minds? That is another matter.
With close cousins we could imagine some process to match neuron to neuron and project some of the patterns of electrical activity from one mind to another. (Although the variation in function of just human minds makes this idea limited.) Perhaps, rather than trying to find analogous structures, we should just expand our minds. Continue to think with our own bodies but then expand our awareness to include the other. (and do we notice that in doing this, their minds incorporate ours?)
This has been my issue with comparative psychology for a while. It makes limited practical sense to try & measure intelligence through the adaptations of our senses & organs. We don't have wings, whiskers or gills. Conversely, saying that an owl is unintelligent because it wouldn't crack a nut or that "a dog has the IQ of a 5-year old human" shows the immaturity of our scientific thought. If a human was to be magically turned into, say, a bee, they'd likely perish quite quickly.
Frans de Waal, dutch primatologist, and animal cognition expert, wrote a great book on this, _Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?_, in which he details the many difficulties in studying animal cognition, and how badly people have mis-estimated the cognitive abilities of many animals. Unfortunately, most of his examples are necessarily about primates, but he's very clear the same problems are more severe for less charismatic animals.
Thanks, I'll give it a read!
@llewelly @illumniscate @futurebird Came here to say this, found you'd said it already. It's a very good book! (Also, his thing on what apes can teach us about gender is interesting without being transphobic.)