I think there’s a lower limit of complexity for sentience, based on memory-persistence, self-firing, and self-recognition. I think there’s no need for moral concern for non-sentient things. (But, that’s just my ethical framework and philosophical worldview; the only “evidence” I’m at all aware of is thin and vague.)
But, as far as having a subjective experience, I think that might go quite small and alien including fungi and plant or even certain sub-cellular structures. Probably anything that maintains a border and internal homeostasis including parts of the bodies of larger experiencers could be having an internal perspective – and any human words applied so those experiences would tell you more about human bias than the experience.
In my view, although I am neither a neurologist nor a philosopher, things should absolutely scale with neuron blob complexity, and it should do so in a non-linear way. I dislike harming an animal with a complex brain like mammals, cephalopods etc. much more than I dislike harming the equivalent nerve mass in insects, for instance.
That’s also the way I feel, but I think that’s probably human bias and closely related to the evolutionary pressure behind my mirror neurons and how strongly they trigger correlates with outside sentient phenotype.
I think if I knew what it felt like (if anything) to be an ant colony, I might have different views around the causal use of boric acid (and related) to keep them out of human spaces.
I think there’s a lower limit of complexity for sentience, based on memory-persistence, self-firing, and self-recognition. I think there’s no need for moral concern for non-sentient things. (But, that’s just my ethical framework and philosophical worldview; the only “evidence” I’m at all aware of is thin and vague.)
But, as far as having a subjective experience, I think that might go quite small and alien including fungi and plant or even certain sub-cellular structures. Probably anything that maintains a border and internal homeostasis including parts of the bodies of larger experiencers could be having an internal perspective – and any human words applied so those experiences would tell you more about human bias than the experience.
In my view, although I am neither a neurologist nor a philosopher, things should absolutely scale with neuron blob complexity, and it should do so in a non-linear way. I dislike harming an animal with a complex brain like mammals, cephalopods etc. much more than I dislike harming the equivalent nerve mass in insects, for instance.
That’s also the way I feel, but I think that’s probably human bias and closely related to the evolutionary pressure behind my mirror neurons and how strongly they trigger correlates with outside sentient phenotype.
I think if I knew what it felt like (if anything) to be an ant colony, I might have different views around the causal use of boric acid (and related) to keep them out of human spaces.