Part 10/16:
He emphasizes that suffering is tied to adaptive signals evolved for survival—like pain or fear—and that creating a system that suffers would involve more than just complex information processing. It would require the system to experience subjective states of misery, which is an open and unresolved question.
He offers a working definition of sentience as any sufficiently advanced information system capable of processing and manipulating information about itself—distinguishing it from human, philosophical consciousness that includes subjective experience.