Jonathan Birch (London School of Economics)
Animal sentience is often regarded as an all-or-nothing property, or one that varies along a single dimension such that some animals are simply "more sentient" than others. I argue that animal sentience varies continuously along several dimensions, and I construct a multidimensional framework for characterizing an animal's form of subjective experience. My proposed framework is based on four key dimensions of variation, which I call valence, grain, unity and flow. All four admit continuous variation, allowing us to assign any organism a "sentience profile" locating it with respect to the four dimensions.
