From my perspective, ‘sentience is a wrong concept’ and ‘sentience isn’t the central thing we morally care about’ isn’t a crux. If I’m confused somehow about sentience, I still expect something similarly complicated about brain algorithms to be where nearly all the value lies, and I still expect ‘does looking at this organism’s external behaviors naively make me feel bad, in the absence of any deep neuroscience or psychology knowledge?’ to be an extraordinarily poor guide to the morally impatient aspects of the relevant brains.
From my perspective, ‘sentience is a wrong concept’ and ‘sentience isn’t the central thing we morally care about’ isn’t a crux. If I’m confused somehow about sentience, I still expect something similarly complicated about brain algorithms to be where nearly all the value lies, and I still expect ‘does looking at this organism’s external behaviors naively make me feel bad, in the absence of any deep neuroscience or psychology knowledge?’ to be an extraordinarily poor guide to the morally impatient aspects of the relevant brains.