Living among us, including inside our own bodies, are organisms so small we cannot see them. Many of them are a single cell. One cell, and that is the whole animal.
Look closely enough and you do not find a tiny human being in there running the operation. You find structures and chemistry. Depending on the organism you find a nucleus, a membrane, genetic material, ribosomes, machinery. The thing takes in energy or produces it. It responds to its environment. It maintains itself. It reproduces. It handles its waste. Somehow all of that cooperates well enough for a speck to stay alive.
Now increase the scale.
You are not one cell. You are trillions of them, organized, cooperating to produce something not one of them could produce alone, which is you.
I am not going to tell you that science has shown every cell to be conscious, because it hasn't, and I'm not qualified to say it either way. What I want you to notice is the pattern. Simple living units organize into tissues. Tissues organize into organs. Organs cooperate in systems. And somewhere in that arrangement a creature appears who can look back at the whole structure and say, I am alive.
Then we do it again at our own size. We organize into families, neighborhoods, cities, religions, companies, nations, civilizations. The individual becomes part of something larger, the same way the cell did. Nobody planned that. It's just what life does when it works.
Which leaves one question sitting there. If life keeps succeeding through organization and cooperation, at every scale we have ever looked at, from the inside of a cell to the inside of a country, then what exactly is happening when one enormous organization of human beings decides it has to destroy another?