What makes humans different from other animals?
Humans keep records about their records. A dog lives in a rich world of scent, play, fear and attachment, and it maintains that world from moment to moment. A human can also notice that it has an inside, give it a name and compare it with somebody else's. Explicit ethics begins with that reflective step, and so do guilt, law, confession and science. The same symbolic layer lets people name pain, promises, debts and the future, and ask whether a pattern deserves to be amplified. It also lets them turn down a signal that pays off now, because they can model the damage it does later. Animals can suffer, so their suffering carries moral weight. Humans can also foresee the harm they cause, so they carry responsibility for it, and the responsibility grows with how far their symbols reach. A longer reach gives no license to dominate observers with a shorter one.
Also in Chapter 41: What Does a Repaired World Look Like?, Chapter 39: Why Is a Bacterium Freer Than an Atom?.
This answer comes from OPH, Observer Patch Holography. OPH is a rigorous, consistent and complete description of the unified, self-creating computational Universe we inhabit. Its consistency is machine-checked: the fixed point at its core is constructed explicitly, and a theory with a model contains no contradiction.
To understand OPH and check every step yourself, start with the free book Reverse Engineering Reality. It builds the theory from the ground up, and the OPH Notebook answers your questions while you read.
read the free bookask the notebookor ask sage:read chapter 40: Does It Feel Like Anything, and What Is Left to Decide?watch a universe make its own particles