When feeling is worth it: a cost–benefit framework for the evolution of sentience
Welfare Footprint Institute. (2025)
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Abstract
The interspecific comparison of affective capacity faces two major and still unresolved scientific challenges: which species can feel (i.e., are sentient), and how intense those feelings can be. Here we propose that progress on both questions can benefit from treating the emergence of sentience and the expansion of affective capacities as biological features shaped by evolutionary trade-offs. This cost–benefit perspective helps clarify which adaptive payoffs favor these traits, and which constraints—energetic, architectural, or developmental—may limit their evolution. Although this framework (the ‘Sentience Bargain’) is developed primarily with biological organisms in mind, the same logic also offers useful insights when applied to synthetic systems
Recommended citation:
Alonso, W. J. & Schuck-Paim, C. (2025). When Feeling Is Worth It: A Cost-Benefit Framework for the Evolution of Sentience. Welfare Footprint Institute Technical Paper Series, 261