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".)

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Consciousness: Consciousness is a quality of the mind generally regarded to comprise qualities such as subjectivity, self-awareness, sentience, sapience, and the ability to perceive the relationship between oneself and one's environment. Philosophers divide consciousness into phenomenal consciousness which is expe...

Self-awareness: Self-awareness is the ability to perceive one's own existence, including one's own traits, feelings and behaviours. In an epistemological sense, self-awareness is a personal understanding of the very core of one's own identity. It is the basis for many other human traits, such as accountability and ...

Sapient: Sapient has several different meanings:...