[MarquesMa]

There are some discussions in this thread [0] that believe that cows and pigs are sentient.

But my point is people seem to assume sentience is a byproduct of high level intelligence, which might not be true. Maybe we need to focus more on "what is sentient", "what makes a sentient thing sentient" first and discover the basic elements of sentience.

If we can formally define sentience, or reverse-engineering sentience, or build a "MVP" or "bare-minimal" sentience. Thing would be much easier discuss.

Here are some random thoughts: Self-awareness might be a consequence of evolution - it might be more optimal to grow self-awareness than other perks to survive. Just like occasionally using reflection in programming could solve hard problems elegantly. Sentience and emotions might also be consequences of evolution - they can be seen as efficient and power tools to communicate, people can efficiently affect a lot of people with their emotion, without conveying rationally by words.

Here's a random idea: Build a complex simulation game, but with relatively simple creations with some evolving capability. If we try to manipulate the environment enough to let self-awareness and emotions to be optimal solution.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31721961