From a cognitive science and philosophy of mind perspective, I agree strongly with your skepticism about treating neuron counts as a linear moral metric. One striking parallel from neuroscience is that we consistently find that subjective experience, including pain and pleasure, cannot be meaningfully reduced to raw cortical or subcortical volume, nor to simple “activation counts.” The phenomenology of consciousness arises from complex network dynamics, feedback loops, and integrative processes; not merely from raw computational “size.”

In NeuroAI research (particularly in embodied control and models inspired by biological architectures), we’ve learned that intelligence and adaptive behaviour do not simply scale with parameter count or “node count” in a network. Rather, it is architectural priors, connectivity patterns, and embodied interaction with the environment that determine emergent capacities. Likewise, many small-brained animals display surprising degrees of flexibility and planning precisely because of such specialized architectures rather than sheer neuron number.