Is sentience the same as consciousness?
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No, Sentience refers to the capacity to have feelings or sensations and is often associated with the ability to experience pleasure and pain. Sentience is considered a basic aspect of consciousness but is more about the ability to feel pain, rather than the full spectrum of awareness that consciousness implies. Most animals are often described as sentient because they can feel pain and experience emotions.

Sentience can be seen as a component or a subset of consciousness. While all conscious beings are sentient, not all sentient beings may possess the higher-order awareness and reflective capacities associated with full consciousness.

But generally, asking “what is sentient? what is not?” is a really hard problem: it’s going to be very hard to generalize from what we know is morally significant in-distribution, to some weird type of computations that are out-of-distribution, because the space of possible different types of computation is really really large. There are more dimensions than data points in a sense, so the problem is fundamentally ill-posed.

It's in the same row of buzzword bingo.