Yes, the difference in consciousness and intelligence are degrees of magnitude, as you say. As a longtime pet owner of everything from barely sentient salamanders to quite intelligent dogs, I know what you mean. I definitely get the sense that there is a self-aware creature looking back at me when I look in a dog’s eyes.

Perhaps I am using the word “miracle” too frivolously. Perhaps the word “marvel” fits better. Consciousness is at least marvelous, if not miraculous.

And, as you suggest, perhaps the true miracles of consciousness await as we develop higher forms of it, maybe not in ourselves but in our machines.

Somehow, Shakespeare constantly surfaces with this particular issue–”what dreams may come.”

Or I think of “To die, to sleep, perchance to dream–ah, there’s the rub.” When Hamlet says these words, he is contemplating suicide and is equating dying with sleeping–loss of consciousness. But then, what Hamlet fears is “perchance to dream.” There’s the rub. What if his actions on earth will haunt him throughout eternity?

At this point, I don’t think that what we do haunts us or rewards us throughout eternity. What we do haunts or rewards the people we leave behind. That’s an even greater responsibility. Our virtues and our sins reward or punish not one person but hundreds or thousands.

If the suicide bombers understood this, they would not be thinking of their seventy-two virgins. They would be wondering whether they were leaving Islam in a better state than they found it.

My great grandfather abandoned my grandfather when he was three. My grandfather was rasied by his maternal grandmother. He, then, married a dominant wife, and his son did, and I did–which means that what my great grandfather did in 1905 is still resonating to the third or fourth generation. His sin–abandoning his family–was not paid out by Satan in hell. It was paid out and continues to be paid out in the flesh and consciousness of all the creatures that have descended from him.

There’s a moment in Lord of the Rings when Frodo and Sam are marching into Mordor, facing certain death, and they console themselves thinking of the songs and stories that others will create to commemorate them. They are thinking of the other consciousnesses that will remember them and carry them onward. That’s what we need to think–not whether God will welcome us as good and faithful servants, but whether other human consciousnesses that follow will say, “Thank God he lived.”