Sentience
Definition
Sentience is the ability to have experiences that feel good or bad. It means being able to feel, and especially to suffer.
On this site
The inner-lives ladder from fruit fly to human is ordered by how likely sentience is. It isn’t a list of confirmed cases.
Role in the model
The inner-lives ladder runs from fruit fly to human, ordered by how likely it is that the entity can suffer. Where you set the cutoff decides how many billions of inhabitants the ethics meters have to weigh. It’s a gradient, not a roster.
Related
14 short pages, one per thinker, each with its matching dial. See also the reading list.