What the heck is consciousness anyway?

[Rynn]

However, interacting with other humans is much easier and more effective if one assumes that they are conscious. I presume that the same would be true if dealing with nonhuman sophonts

Sure, from a legal/ethical standpoint it makes sense that if you are reasonably unsure if something claiming to be sophont is indeed sophont then you should err on the side of caution and treat it as such. Better to waste time treating an object as sophont than to abuse a sophont by treating them as an object.

Having said that in OA we assume that understanding of consciousness/sophonce, what it is, how it is generated etc is far more advanced (makes sense given their millennia of work on AI, neural engineering, uploading etc) so in principle an OA civ could "open up the head" of a thinking object and tell you if it was sophont or just good at pretending to be.