This is just extending the "sentience is that which is human" definition to animals. What about animals makes them sentient? Until we can answer that, people a

This is just extending the "sentience is that which is human" definition to animals. What about animals makes them sentient? Until we can answer that, people are just going to be talking past each other. Even if you forget about AI, whether animals are sentient, and, if so, which animals are sentient, is a big argument in biology/ethics/law that's been going on for at least half a century. The UK recently passed a law that declares animals to be sentient, but not all invertebrates are considered sentient in that law. Their justification is that they don't contain a central nervous system, but what special property about a CNS confers sentience?