[hirundo]

"But none of this gets at the most important thing about the chili-pepper scenario: your suffering. After all, why do you care about the pain the pepper causes? Naturally, it is because of the suffering involved. It is only because you are sentient that you suffer."

Plants also respond to various stimuli in the same way but on a different time scale. Plants do care about such stimuli, whether you consider that suffering or not. So either sentience is not required for this kind of reaction or plants are also sentient. The same is true for microbes.

If they are sentient we have to rethink a moral vegetarianism that's based on sentience. If they are not, but they respond in the same way, then sentiocentrism should indeed be questioned.

[physicles]

When a Roomba responds to various stimuli, does that cause you wonder whether it's sentient?

I guess my point is that we still don't have any idea how to determine whether something is sentient. That includes other humans (though for that, we just apply Occam's Razor and call it a day).

I do think that in a few years, we'll have LLMs with plugins for memory and perception, executing not in a web-based repl but in real-time, and it's going to get harder and harder to argue that they're not sentient.