Actually yes. Even the leaves the caterpillars ate are conscious. One has enough evidence of that from Jagdish Chandra Bose to Luther Burbank for the common reader. It simply is that as individuals, most humans are arrogant Gods that actually do hold a belief that they need to be worshipped and thus obeyed to the last sigh from either orifice. That in part ironically helps explain most religions and their Gods too. It also helps comprehend human history and the idea that the universe was designed for us - to serve us. Quite evident how for-granted we take our breath till we falter in that, or other taken-for-granted organs and cells in our own body. Likewise the planet till we grudgingly are forced to accept humanity as a creation & not its creator. To be forgotten at the next 50 million clean profit - for lazily choosing some jackpot numbers for a lottery ticket we idly purchase! The philistine party that it can trigger for someone like me who has been starved of sex for more than a decade - I suppose that I will rely upon the above paragraph to feel mortal again. There is something so peculiarly self-insulting in that common expression many of use to describe 'us common mortals'! If you ask the Hindu urchins and goons of India that power the backside of its Hindu radicals & their political outfits (like others power other outfits each claims to be uniquely secular and democratic - nay, in fact having invented politics itself - you'll find the winning goons and the losing goons - they just have had some local elections - mind you the word elections in a multi-party democratic ritual the newspapers would note is distinctly of the goon variety in expressions and experiences for most parts - and their reactions would largely make it clear the Gods and the denied Gods of human behaviour. Our arrogance-in-ignorance is still what we call 'bestial' at its foundational level ( while animals or beasts aren't really that bestial at all - for the word to have any meaning!) and that powers our imaginations and what we term the intellectual ones at those. Till a me wins a 50 million jackpot and find my mortal moments perhaps defined by my organs in my over-indulgence! Hope I die in sheer orgasmic bliss and not have to worry or bother if there is some difference between my organs and cellular structure and me that become distinct only in my mortal moments!