What Makes A Being Sentient?

Being A Vegan Doesn’t Help

Having conversations with nature is actually common, its just that we don’t know all the languages.

Most people assume that only mammals, out of all the animals that live on this planet, are truly sentient, because they have a nervous system with a brain just like us.

Some people will allow that birds and fish, and perhaps reptiles, are also sentient, mostly because their pain receptors and overall bicameral body shape is similar to ours.

Once we enter into the world of the invertebrates, which comprises most of the animal mass on the planet, we find a surprising indifference to their possible sentience.

Is this because of our own pragmatic nature? If we considered invertebrates sentient, how would it be possible for us to kill them by the trillions every year?

If the definition of sentience is simply “an organism that experiences life through its senses,” is not all life sentient, in which case why even coin such a term?

At what trophic level do we consider organisms to be sentient?

Are the decomposers, such as bacteria and fungi, sentient? Don’t they activate and operate via stimulis, such as the presence…