Because sentience is a binary question, and intensity of subjective experience is a scale, I feel like that should also be asked separately. People might being conflating the two by giving a low confidence probability in sentience, when they really mean they are sentience but just have experiences which aren’t that intense.
Hello. I would take for granted that all animals are sentient, and focus on assessing the distribution of the intensity of subjective experiences. I think asking about the probability of sentience of an animal shares some of the issues of asking about the probability that an object is hot. People have different concepts about what “hot” means, and they do not depend just on temperature (for example, the minimum temperature for hot wood is higher than the minimum temperature for hot metal because this transfers heat more efficiently). I understand sentience as having subjective experiences whose intensity is not exactly 0. However, I suspect you are right that some people understand it as having subjective experiences which are sufficiently intense. Different bars for this will lead to different probabilities. Asking about the distribution of the intensity of subjective experiences mitigates this. For example, one could ask about the probability of the mean intensity of the pain shrimps experience during air asphyxiation exceeding the intensity of disabling pain in humans.
Because sentience is a binary question, and intensity of subjective experience is a scale, I feel like that should also be asked separately. People might being conflating the two by giving a low confidence probability in sentience, when they really mean they are sentience but just have experiences which aren’t that intense.
Hello. I would take for granted that all animals are sentient, and focus on assessing the distribution of the intensity of subjective experiences. I think asking about the probability of sentience of an animal shares some of the issues of asking about the probability that an object is hot. People have different concepts about what “hot” means, and they do not depend just on temperature (for example, the minimum temperature for hot wood is higher than the minimum temperature for hot metal because this transfers heat more efficiently). I understand sentience as having subjective experiences whose intensity is not exactly 0. However, I suspect you are right that some people understand it as having subjective experiences which are sufficiently intense. Different bars for this will lead to different probabilities. Asking about the distribution of the intensity of subjective experiences mitigates this. For example, one could ask about the probability of the mean intensity of the pain shrimps experience during air asphyxiation exceeding the intensity of disabling pain in humans.
This seems directionality correct. I would love some qualitative responses as well to try to gauge how people are understanding the question.