Comment by dTal

I would caution against deriving too much of your philosophical worldview from a scifi book about posthuman vampires that has been deliberately engineered to make a philosophical point that is most certainly not a consensus.

For alternative viewpoints: Daniel Dennett considered philosophical zombies to be logically incoherent. Douglas Hofstadter similarly holds that "meaning" is just another word for isomorphism, and that a thing is a duck exactly to the extent that it walks and quacks like one. Alan Turing advocated empiricism when evaluating unknown intelligence. These are smart cookies.