So the goal here is to achieve sentience in machines, and not just sentience, but empathy.

This holds true for other aspects, such as sentience or self awareness.

Consciousness consists of all those states of feeling or sentience or awareness.

And there are things moving towards greater complexity, moving towards greater diversity, moving towards greater specialization, sentience, ubiquity and most important, evolvability Those very same things are also present in technology.

You can have a completely objective science, a science where you make objectively true claims, about a domain whose existence is subjective, whose existence is in the human brain consisting of subjective states of sentience or feeling or awareness.

The fact that it essentially makes up our brain and our nervous system and is responsible for the thoughts and our feelings and maybe for all of our sentience, I think, would easily make it the top one or two cells.