If your criteria is sentience and not ability to feel pain, then what are your thoughts on a newborn baby? Or someone with severe brain trauma? Is euthenasia ok for those born with the brain capacity of a cow or lobster? Or are you just being speciesist?
I think that pain is different from suffering. To suffer is to hold an abstract mental model of a world that could be and a world that is and experience discomfort at what is rather than merely processing a pain signal and responding with a reflex action. To suffer requires a modestly complex brain while having a reflexive response to a signal doesn't require any sort of central nervous system at all.
For context some approximations insofar as number of neurons for a rough and imperfect estimate of brain complexity
The apparent divergence of the first 2 entries whereas ants and roaches seem very stupid singly makes one wonder how many neurons exactly are needed to have a complex internal life. One would be hard pressed to imagine the single ant, roach, or bee suffers but the relatively complex behavior of the jumping spider makes it easier to imagine it suffering.
It is however easy to see there is little similarity between lobster and octopus when the latter has 500 x as many brain cells.
I was speaking against reductionism but while we are there, as your examples alude to, counting neurons to determine sentience is like counting GHz to determine computational power.
It's really not. Frequency is nearly meaningless as you can have as many computational elements as you like operating at a given frequency meaning it tells you nearly nothing. It's like counting transistors which actually DOES work even if imperfectly.
But neurons are like compitational elements. There are different sorts with different power. In fact some human neurons have features that no other neurons have.
I didn’t propose criteria, and certainly not those criteria. I don’t see sentience as anything more than highly evolved self preservation software. It’s not magic.
