Are Insects Conscious?

I don't think you are being fair to the writer, because you are quoting her brief summary of research which is making her change her mind.

Ultimately the problem is that any behaviour could in principle be evidence of consciousness or evidence of programmed behaviour. I might be an advanced robot which is being tested with the task of writing ideas on this forum, or I could be me, consciously thinking about what I write!

If I am a robot, I am obviously busy undermining one of my beliefs - that when the hype has settled, AI will not look so intelligent after all.

I underlined 'in principle' because this is the weasely phrase in so many discussions, such as, in principle we could run a QM simulation of the human brain.....

I think there is a continuum all the way down to the cells discussed in the paper I quoted above - I don't think it is meaningful to specify a point where consciousness stops. As the author points out, you can't really claim that organisms without a cerebral cortex can't be conscious, without first understanding what is special about the cerebral cortex. However, as you move to simpler and simpler organisms, it is fair to ask if consciousness has qualitatively changed, I suppose.

Just this.