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You propose in your writings that universal creativity can emerge from lower-level, mindless computation, and that consciousness is among the emergent properties associated with creativity. But why must phenomenal experience emerge only together with universal creativity?

The fact that simple execution-only systems are not conscious does not show that no noncreative computation can have phenomenal properties. For example, pain could in principle have emerged from a different kind of lower-level computation long before that system acquired universal creativity.

So unless there is an explanation for why phenomenal experience cannot emerge from noncreative computation, the inference from “animals are noncreative” to “animals are insentient” does not seem to follow.

The inference would seem more natural in the opposite direction: evidence that animals lacked phenomenal experience might support doubts about more general mental capacities, but the absence of universal creativity does not by itself explain why even pain or color experience should be absent.