Sentience
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Sentience is the ability to feel, perceive, or to experience subjectivity. Eighteenth century philosophers used the concept to distinguish the ability to think (reason) from the ability to feel (sentience). In modern western philosophy, sentience is the ability to experience sensations (known in philosophy of mind as "qualia"). For Eastern philosophy, sentience is a metaphysical quality of all things that requires respect and care. The concept is central to the philosophy of animal rights, because sentience is necessary for the ability to suffer, which is held to entail certain rights.
Etymology
From Proto-Italic *sentjō, from Proto-Indo-European *sent- (“to feel”). Cognate with Lithuanian sintėti (“to think”), Old High German sinnan (“to go; desire”).
See also
- Blindsight
- Causality
- Consciousness
- Explanatory gap
- Hard problem of consciousness
- List of films about possessed or sentient inanimate objects
- Mind
- Mind-body problem
- Mirror test
- Pain in invertebrates
- Philosophical zombie
- Philosophy of mind
- Problem of other minds
- Solipsism
- Turing test