given that we don't remember what happened before our lives, and most likely when we die we enter a similar state... so that life starts whenever a physical life begins (later a mental life starts and exists until the time that physical life dies)... Then the idea that all creatures are conscious is a pretty bad idea. It means that being a conscious being such as a human is ridiculously improbable, given the very high ratio of all conscious creatures count vs human count.
Sāṁkhya philosophy covers this. This state is called 'tamas', the state of ignorance.
> It means that being a conscious being such as a human is ridiculously improbable
Yes it is. Human birth and animal birth is similar if you notice: eating, sleeping, mating and defending. What's different then? Human birth is the only birth where it's possible to philosophize and ask questions about existence and ask about teleology, objective purposes in life. This is why human birth is rare and Sāṁkhya philosophy would say that every animal's consciousness will at one point experience the human body as consciousness keeps leveling up after each death, say from a tree to an insect to a fish to a bird to an animal to a human.
Animals are bound by their senses and instincts. They follow whatever their senses want them to so there's not much free will, it's compulsion by the senses.
Human beings have free will due to intelligence. One has 2 minds: the higher mind which is intelligence and capable of controlling the lower mind and, the lower mind which basically is connected to the senses (so mind would be like a hardware interface device controller).
The higher mind, intelligence would be like an OS scheduling tasks. When the HID Controller takes control, it allows anything and everything at once but add intelligence or OS to that equation and you have everything running in a systematic manner.
The senses would be like the hardware devices: Mouse, Keyboard, Speakers, Camera. All providing data and the HID controller trying to just take it all in, as much data as it possibly can get.
> so that life starts whenever a physical life begins
Consciousness is still consciousness. It's what enables this 'physical life' and it's what powers the 'mental life'. If you take them to be 2 different things, then that would ensue that the arrangement of subatomic particles in a particular mechanical configuration is capable of producing this 'physical life' but that is not the case.
Consciousness is the irreducible entity, separate from matter, that animates matter.
