Summaries of the Presentations at the Egals 1 Seminar 2017 at Katowice University , Poland

Most if not all vertebrates and probably some other Metazoa (animals as currently defined in science), are sentient. Sentience is the outcome of converting biological values into good (positive) or bad (negative) experience. The good or bad experiences (feelings) are generated in a vertebrate brain by dedicated structures in response to exposure to biologically beneficial or detrimental factors that impact Darwinian fitness. In order to be effective as a reward or punishment for biologically productive or counterproductive behaviors, an experience must be associated with its source object or event. This is what consciousness is about. Sentience is the experiential aspect of consciousness. In operational terms, consciousness is the identification of an object or event using its mental (central) representation. A positive or negative representation motivates appetitive or agonistic behaviors. Having such representations identifies a being as a subject, and acting upon them – as an agent. Sentience conveys individual interests. Every subject/agent strives to maximize the positive (gratifying) and to minimize the negative (punitive) experience and thus has an interest in everything that allows her/him to achieve that goal. An interest is the positive value of future actions or events for a subject. In line with Western philosophies of law (Hans Kelsen, Alf Ross, Neil MacCormick, Leon Petrażycki) having interests is a sufficient condition for the capacity to hold legal rights. Vertebrates (and possibly some other animals as far as their sentience is demonstrated by science) ought to be granted legal rights and thus be treated as subjects rather objects of law. However, the recent attempts to extend legal rights beyond Homo sapiens focused on a few mammalian species that share with humans at least basic cognitive faculties of persons: rationality (Boethius, Aquinas, Kant) which, in the basic sense, manifests itself as a conscious choice of means to an end and thus requires an understanding of causality; and the mental projection of oneself through