sentience
Capacity for feeling
Sentience is the capacity to have subjective experiences—to feel sensations like pain, pleasure, or emotion.
The term appears most often in philosophical and ethical debates about which beings deserve moral consideration: Does sentience extend to insects?
In science fiction, sentience distinguishes conscious artificial intelligence from mere computation.
A sentient being isn't just processing information; it's experiencing something.
Mental interpretation of stimuli
- consciousnessState of sentient awareness
- alertnessActive mental awareness
- sensitivityResponsiveness to stimuli
- attentivenessConcentrated awareness of surroundings
cognizance · wakefulness · responsiveness · discernment · acuity · vigilance · recognition · mindfulness
Profound intellectual discernment
- intelligenceMental ability, cognitive capacity
- reasoningDrawing logical conclusions
- thoughtMental concept or reflection
- understandingMental comprehension of something
comprehension · intellect · judgment · learning · wisdom · insight · knowledge · mental capacity
State of sentient awareness
- qualiaSubjective character of experiences
- subjective experienceFirst-person felt quality
- phenomenologyStudy of subjective experience
- dualismPhilosophy of opposed pairs
functionalism · zombies · Chalmers · mind-body · emergence · physicalism · intentionality
Moral claims for fauna
- personhoodStatus as a person
- dignityInnate personal worth
- welfareComfort and prosperity
- crueltyDeliberate harm-causing disposition
factory farming · speciesism · animal liberation · suffering · exploitation · consciousness · intrinsic value · rights
perception
Mental interpretation of stimuli
- consciousnessState of sentient awareness
- alertnessActive mental awareness
- sensitivityResponsiveness to stimuli
attentiveness · cognizance · wakefulness · responsiveness · discernment · acuity · vigilance · recognition · mindfulness · presence
sapience
Profound intellectual discernment
- intelligenceMental ability, cognitive capacity
- reasoningDrawing logical conclusions
- thoughtMental concept or reflection
understanding · comprehension · intellect · judgment · learning · wisdom · insight · knowledge · mental capacity · problem-solving
consciousness
State of sentient awareness
- qualiaSubjective character of experiences
- subjective experienceFirst-person felt quality
- phenomenologyStudy of subjective experience
dualism · functionalism · zombies · Chalmers · mind-body · emergence · physicalism · intentionality
animal rights
Moral claims for fauna
- personhoodStatus as a person
- dignityInnate personal worth
- welfareComfort and prosperity
cruelty · factory farming · speciesism · animal liberation · suffering · exploitation · consciousness · intrinsic value · rights · protection
feelings
Emotional responses experienced internally
- empathySharing another's emotions
- sufferingSustained experience of distress
- pleasureHappy, satisfied feeling
pain · joy · fear · distress · contentment · affect · hedonic · welfare · well-being · happiness
- mindmind, thought, cognition, consciousness, thinking
- awarenessalertness, aware, attention, cognizance, conscious
- AI conceptsneural network, artificial general intelligence, neural net, superintelligence, CNN
- AI ethicsalgorithmic bias, robot rights, AI rights, moral agency, human oversight
- animacyanimate, inanimate, living, nonliving, alive
- food ethicsethical eating, veganism, ethical sourcing, vegetarianism, cruelty-free
sentienceinsentience
Absence of consciousness
unconsciousness · insensibility · oblivion · senselessness · unawareness
sentiencedeath
Cessation of life
nonexistence · lifelessness · fatality · extinction · annihilation
- sentient beingThing with awareness
- sentient machinesTechnology with awareness
- sentient AISoftware with subjective experience
- sentient androidThinking humanoid machine