Consciousness is not sentience, and if it's all semantics I don't care but if people are going to make moral arguments using this conflation between the two then I have a problem. As it says in the article, sentience is roughly the ability to feel valenced emotions (good/bad). Consciousness is many things, but importantly the ability to feel qualia, experiencing what feels like the 'blueness' of blue, for example.
It's totally possible that all sorts of life forms are conscious. I just think to focus on sentience and call it consciousness is silly.
It's totally possible that all sorts of life forms are conscious. I just think to focus on sentience and call it consciousness is silly.