One of them we know to be sentient. We can't be so sure about lions. I'm not talking about higher-order intelligence, I'm talking about sentience -- the abilit

One of them we know to be sentient. We can't be so sure about lions. I'm not talking about higher-order intelligence, I'm talking about sentience -- the ability to experience. It is rather simple now to find a program that would defeat the original formulation for a Turing test, but no one would describe them as having consciousness. However, I believe it very possible that humans are doing much the same thing with a sort of sentience Turing test that we project onto animals. They _seem_ to have experience, because they react to stimuli. But the same is true of the computer. We know that creatures with basically nothing in the way of a brain, take earthworms or severed octopus tentacles, will react to pain, hide from it. We also know that pain has two parts -- a conscious experience, and an animal aversion. This is made clear by the existence of Pain asymbolia, where a person gets damage to the insular cortex (a lower part of the brain), and is no longer averse to pain, despite reporting that they still experience the pain just as they did before the injury. I believe it quite likely that consciousness exists in the human brain alone, and is of very recent evolutionary vintage, evolving in conjunction with language. That when humans project sentience on their pets they are basically falling in love with a biological automaton, no different from a person falling in love with a chat-bot. Unless we find a reason to believe that mere programming couldn't account for the behavior of animals (which seems increasingly unlikely, as our own rather rudimentary robots advance), it seems much more likely that evolution would have evolved the simple instinct system first -- only adding consciousness later on when it became an evolutionary necessity, as could have been the case for complex communication about qualia.