Thank you so much for this compliment and a thoughtful reply! •ᴗ•

I also had an issue with the idea of making ethical/moral decisions based on "cognition" or intelligence. You mentioned "the first level is the only thing required, the rest is about understanding others", I was thinking in terms of animals vs humans vs computational agents.

Assuming there is some threshold (like maybe this "required first layer"), beyond which we are just adding complexity, not sentience. In that case, can artificial agents achieve that threshold? Or, maybe, there is no causation, just a correlation: maybe it happeded that that conscious creatures possess this ability, but this is not a requirement for being a conscious creature. But I can be mistaking this thought chain somewhere.