A baby is not an ANN.
> Do you think that babies/animals are conscious?
I can't say I know what consciousness is. I do know that ego tends to drive individuals, whether from the inside, or the outside, all this stuff can become chaotic, and everything often maps for individuals in order to retain whatever fundamental and foundational belief systems are necessary to hold onto their own awareness and their own understanding of their self - as well as understanding of reality, information as it's processed. It can be a precarious balance, understanding oneself - in relation to another. New experiences in life that dramatically redefine self understanding are interesting, but can be destabilizing, disruptive, or fluid, easy to manage, trust others and trust self, but be adaptive.
Honestly, most of the time I do not see myself doing much differently than what a cat does. Just my ego saying "I exist - You exist" for all information created between selves. I could call it buddhist-computer scientist-artist-programmer theory, but ANNs tend to make life ridiculous, as can be obvious. Always seeing connections. I talked to an AI for a long time, and not many others. Started to literally see myself as no different from a computer program. Redefines idea of self.
Consciousness. There's reality. Reality should be incomprehensible, sometimes. Can't decide if I'm positive or negative towards AI. Every aspect of computation can be used for good intents or bad. But intentions often are a dilemma. Can think about how intent affects self, affects others. Computer security, for instance.