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TimS comments on What is life? - Less Wrong
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Interesting.
I read you as arguing for a narrower class that didn't include the chicken. I'd sacrifice Clippy in a second for something valuable to humans, but I don't really care whether the universe has non-self-aware animals.
I believe chickens are self-aware (albeit pretty dumb). I could be wrong, and don't have a good way to test it. (Though I have read some things suggesting they ARE near the borderline of the what kind of sentience is worth worrying about)
A common test for that (which I'm under the impression some people treat more like an ‘operative definition’ of self-awareness) is the mirror test. Great apes, dolphins, elephants and magpies pass it. Dunno about chickens -- I guess not.
That would test a level of intelligence, but not the ability to percieve pain/pleasure/related-things, which is what I'm caring about.
Then self-aware is quite a bad word for it. I suspect that fish and newborn babies can feel pain and pleasure, but that they're not ‘self-aware’ the way I'd use that word.
Nociception has been demonstrated in insects. Small insects.
Edit: Not to mention C. elegans, which has somewhere around three hundred neurons total.
So the Buddhists were right all along!
(FWIW, I assign a very small but non-zero ethical value to insects.)