Very interesting how HN somehow knows what topics are in the air. For completely unrelated reasons I was looking for a term for an entity that is in status, adjacent to but not human, and came across the term paraconsciousness. This is apparently used by some researchers as a shorthand to refer to this intermediate stage between subclinical consciousness (due to insufficient in neural development from zygote to some in utero phase), and whenever full consciousness is indicated, as in the linked article.