Sentience

Sentience is the capacity for basic consciousness — the ability to feel or perceive, not necessarily including the faculty of self-awareness. The word sentient is often confused with the word sapient, which can connotate knowledge, higher consciousness, or apperception. The root of the confusion is that the word conscious has a number of different meanings in English. (One can easily distinguish the two by looking at their Latin roots: sentire, "to feel"; and sapere, "to know".)

Related Topics:
Consciousness - Self-awareness - Sapient - Knowledge - Apperception - English - Latin - Roots

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