Very good article. I came to a realization a couple of weeks ago, and it was this… I was no longer convinced that “people” were sentient.
I know that sounds strange, but I had a friend once that was a hoarder and I didn’t find out for quite some time. She collected anything including garbage and rented storage lockers to store all that stuff in. They were packed to the ceiling almost, 12 feet high. I saw it once and there were single right shoes without the left, and vice versa. She visited the storage locker daily and continued accumulating more stuff.
When confronted about the fact that she hoards, she had zero idea of what I was asking her. In her mind it was totally normal. It was her stuff. There was absolutely no way of making her see that there was something abnormal. She wasn’t being wilful, she was genuinely cognitively blind to it. She had what is called an idio-syntonic psychiatric illness. This is the opposite of an ego-alien illness.
So, what am I trying to say… what if people everywhere suffered an idio-syntonic existence, but did not manifest any bizarre symptoms? In other words, they appear normal. How would we know? I know that what I’ve seen is real, and it made me realize that I’ve been taking a huge leap of faith in thinking everyone is like me.

In my opinion, that friend was simply a robot, or at least indistinguishable from a robot. Perhaps that is why people appear stupid?