In addition if they are sentient, then I would estimate their experience of pain might be between 1x and 1,000x less important than that of an individual human.
This is the reason why I agree that there’s a non-negligible chance that insect suffering is “only” moderately important, though I think the chance is higher than “small-ish” (despite the fact that I think insects are 100% conscious/sentient). I come at it from a non-materialist physicalist stance on consciousness, assuming that suffering is (super roughly) proportional to the energy of the electromagnetic field in each nervous system times the degree of dissonance/asymmetry in the field (quantified using some metric tbd). Given the size of many insects, the EM field they generate is very weak, so maybe the worst suffering an insect endures is just not too bad (maybe comparable to stubbing one’s toe lightly). But I’m not sure (especially about how suffering scales with size), so I still think there’s some chance the suffering is quite bad.
This is the reason why I agree that there’s a non-negligible chance that insect suffering is “only” moderately important, though I think the chance is higher than “small-ish” (despite the fact that I think insects are 100% conscious/sentient). I come at it from a non-materialist physicalist stance on consciousness, assuming that suffering is (super roughly) proportional to the energy of the electromagnetic field in each nervous system times the degree of dissonance/asymmetry in the field (quantified using some metric tbd). Given the size of many insects, the EM field they generate is very weak, so maybe the worst suffering an insect endures is just not too bad (maybe comparable to stubbing one’s toe lightly). But I’m not sure (especially about how suffering scales with size), so I still think there’s some chance the suffering is quite bad.
(Thanks for posting this, @Bentham’s Bulldog! I enjoyed reading it. 🙂)