Well argued, and addresses the obvious question “okey but if they’re sentient at all it’s got to be a tiny amount, right?”
This seems like the crux of disagreement I’ve had with some of your previous points; sure, pain is bad, but the intensity or “realness” of pain has to be on a spectrum of some sort it seems to me.
It does seem like you’ve got to make that adjustment to avoid another implausible conclusion, that sentience “switches on” at some point, leaving a spider non-sentient (say) but a beetle fully sentient (or some other narrow dividing line)?
Intelligence woulgn’t be the same spectrum, but it would seem like a bacterium isn’t complex enough to have a subjective feeling of suffering, and very simple insects probably have very little of it.
Bees are an interesting exception by having relativelly complex behavior and learning. But being able to manage 7% of human suffering while having only 1/1000 of neurons doesn’t seem likely… I think their cognitive abilities probably aren’t correlated with general mental sophistication in the same way mammals or avian brains with cortexes are.
Well argued, and addresses the obvious question “okey but if they’re sentient at all it’s got to be a tiny amount, right?”
This seems like the crux of disagreement I’ve had with some of your previous points; sure, pain is bad, but the intensity or “realness” of pain has to be on a spectrum of some sort it seems to me.
It does seem like you’ve got to make that adjustment to avoid another implausible conclusion, that sentience “switches on” at some point, leaving a spider non-sentient (say) but a beetle fully sentient (or some other narrow dividing line)?
Intelligence woulgn’t be the same spectrum, but it would seem like a bacterium isn’t complex enough to have a subjective feeling of suffering, and very simple insects probably have very little of it.
Bees are an interesting exception by having relativelly complex behavior and learning. But being able to manage 7% of human suffering while having only 1/1000 of neurons doesn’t seem likely… I think their cognitive abilities probably aren’t correlated with general mental sophistication in the same way mammals or avian brains with cortexes are.