I feel like it’s quite straightforward - if it’s a living breathing thing it can be conscious, if it is a set of man made mathamatical models that can be switched of, it can be intelligent, but not conscious.
And life itself doesn’t mean consciousness. And ultimately what is life? Something that has biological processes and reproduces? Why can’t we replace or recreate these processes with manmade equivalents to get the same results?
I find it strange that people are quite often unwilling to see animals as conscious yet here we are discussing if an empheral computer programme is. Have a think on why we don’t eat people but eat chickens - chickens are clearly more conscious than any AI, yet still not enough to stop them being considered food.
Cannibalism has nothing to do with it as some seemingly conscious humans have shown this behaviour in the past.