Not disagreeing with your overall point, just want to say that being smart is not a prerequisite for suffering. I don’t even think it’s possible to have a “primitive consciousness”, or a “sophisticated consciousness”. A being is either conscious or, well, it simply is not - it doesn’t exist. As an individual, you either exist independently or… you just don’t - not even blackness.
Let’s say that bees are conscious. Each individual bee has a unique internal existence just as you or I have. If you are a human (actually I’m assuming you are) then your experience certainly differs from the experience that a bee has, but that consciousness, that isolated spark of being, that is the same. If you were to shut your eyes and still your mind, and we imagine a bee could also do that (just give them imaginary eyelids for this thought experiment) then both of you would be experiencing the same thing, for that brief time you are both in that state of wordless shapeless existence.
You could perhaps wake up from this meditative state as the bee, coming to with a shake of your head, and fly off away from the flower you’d been resting on. “Woah what a weird dream” you’d think in bee language, then a new enticing fragrance from another flower fills your olfactory glands and you are drawn irresistibly towards it, quickly forgetting that funny dream of being a great big thing stuck heavily to the ground with two arms and legs hanging off your body.
Not disagreeing with your overall point, just want to say that being smart is not a prerequisite for suffering. I don’t even think it’s possible to have a “primitive consciousness”, or a “sophisticated consciousness”. A being is either conscious or, well, it simply is not - it doesn’t exist. As an individual, you either exist independently or… you just don’t - not even blackness.
Let’s say that bees are conscious. Each individual bee has a unique internal existence just as you or I have. If you are a human (actually I’m assuming you are) then your experience certainly differs from the experience that a bee has, but that consciousness, that isolated spark of being, that is the same. If you were to shut your eyes and still your mind, and we imagine a bee could also do that (just give them imaginary eyelids for this thought experiment) then both of you would be experiencing the same thing, for that brief time you are both in that state of wordless shapeless existence.
You could perhaps wake up from this meditative state as the bee, coming to with a shake of your head, and fly off away from the flower you’d been resting on. “Woah what a weird dream” you’d think in bee language, then a new enticing fragrance from another flower fills your olfactory glands and you are drawn irresistibly towards it, quickly forgetting that funny dream of being a great big thing stuck heavily to the ground with two arms and legs hanging off your body.