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Sentience
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Sentience is the ability to feel or perceive subjectively. It is an important concept in philosophy, particularly in the philosophy of animal rights and in eastern philosophy, as well as in science fiction and the study of artificial intelligence, although in each of these fields the term is used slightly differently. Advocates of animal rights argue that all animals are sentient in that they can feel pleasure and pain, which entails the presumption of certain moral rights and ought to entail some legal rights.
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Sentience is the ability to feel or perceive subjectively. It is an important concept in philosophy, particularly in the philosophy of animal rights and in eastern philosophy, as well as in science fiction and the study of artificial intelligence, although in each of these fields the term is used slightly differently. Advocates of animal rights argue that all animals are sentient in that they can feel pleasure and pain, which entails the presumption of certain moral rights and ought to entail some legal rights. In eastern philosophy, sentience is a metaphysical quality of all things that requires our respect and care. In science fiction, sentience is "personhood": the essential quality that separates humankind from machines or lower animals. Sentience is used in the study of consciousness to describe the ability to have sensations or experiences, known to some philosophers as "qualia".
Non-human animal rights and sentience
In the philosophy of animal rights, sentience entails the ability to experience pleasure and pain. Animal rights advocates argue that anything that can suffer is sentient and that anything sentient is deserving of rights.
In the 17th century Thomas Tryon, a self-proclaimed Pythagorean, raised the issue of non-human suffering. Soon thereafter, many philosophers used the anatomical discoveries of the Enlightenment as a reason to include animals in what philosophers call "sympatheia," the principle of who or what deserves sympathy. Benjamin Franklin's autobiography identifies Tryon's writings as an influence in his decision to try vegetarianism; later in the book, he reverts to eating meat while still following Tryon's basic philosophy. Joseph Ritson coupled Tryon's work with Rousseau's for "Essay on Abstinence from Animal Food" as many Rousseauists became vegetarian. Voltaire compared the Hindu treatment of animals to how Europe's emperors & Popes treated even their fellow men, praising the former and heaping shame upon the latter; in the 17th century, Descartes, Pierre Gassendi, and Francis Bacon also advocated vegetarianism.
The 18th century philosopher Jeremy Bentham compiled Enlightenment beliefs in , and he included his own reasoning in a comparison between slavery and sadism toward animals:
In the 20th century, Princeton University professor Peter Singer argued that Bentham's conclusion is often dismissed by an appeal to a distinction that condemns human suffering but allows non-human suffering, typically "appeals" that are logical fallacies. Because many of the suggested distinguishing features of humanity—extreme intelligence; highly complex language; etc.—are not present in marginal cases such as young or mentally disabled humans, it appears that the only distinction is a prejudice based on species alone, which non-human animal rights supporters call speciesism—that is, differentiating humans from other animals purely on the grounds that they are human.
Gary Francione also bases his abolitionist theory of animal rights, which differs significantly from Singer's, on sentience. He asserts that "all sentient beings, humans or nonhuman, have one right: the basic right not to be treated as the property of others."
Andrew Linzey, founder of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics in England, is known as a foremost international advocate for recognizing animals as sentient beings in Biblically-based faith traditions. The Interfaith Association of Animal Chaplains encourages animal ministry groups to adopt a policy of recognizing and valuing sentient beings.
Science fiction
In science fiction, an alien, android, robot, hologram or computer who is described as "sentient" is often ascribed qualities such as will, desire, consciousness, ethics, personality, intelligence, insight, and so on. Sentience is being used in this context to describe an essential human property that brings all these other qualities with it. An entity that it is "sentient" will be treated as completely human character, with similar rights, capabilities and desires as any other character. The words sapience, self-awareness and consciousness are used in similar ways in science fiction.
Some science fiction plot lines explore ethical concerns analogous to the concerns of advocates of animal rights. In an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, "The Measure of a Man," Data, a sentient android, takes legal action to prove that he has the same rights as a human being. In the Star Trek: Voyager episode "Author, Author" the Doctor, a holographic program by nature, fights for his rights as a sentient lifeform. The film Artificial Intelligence: A.I. considers a machine in the form of a small boy which has been given the ability to feel human emotions, including the capacity to suffer.
In many science fiction works sentience is often used as a synomym for sapience meaning "human-level or higher intelligence". But others make a distinction; for example, in David Brin's Uplift stories, the Tandu are undoubtedly sapient (both technologically skilled and cunning) but only marginally sentient, since they regard other races and sometimes other Tandu mainly as potential prey.
Eastern religion
Eastern religions including Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and Jainism recognize nonhumans as sentient beings. In Jainism and Hinduism, this is closely related to the concept of ahimsa, nonviolence toward other beings. In Jainism, all matter is endowed with sentience; there are five degrees of sentience, from one to five. Water, for example, is a sentient being of first order, as it is considered to possess only one sense, that of touch. Man is considered to be sentient being of the fifth order. According to Buddhism, sentient beings made of pure consciousness are possible. In Mahayana Buddhism, which includes Zen and Tibetan Buddhism, the concept is related to the Bodhisattva, an enlightened being devoted to the liberation of others. The first vow of a Bodhisattva states: "Sentient beings are numberless; I vow to free them."
Sentience is, from a Buddhist perspective, the state of having senses (sat + ta in Pali or sat + tva in Sanskrit). In Buddhism, the senses are six in number, the sixth being the mind or consciousness, just as consciousness is in the whole body. Sentience, then, is the ability to sense / experience pain and pleasure, make conscious choices, such as abstaining from action, speech, speculation, etc. Thus, while an animal qualifies as a sentient being, a computer doesn't, for at least two reasons: (a) Even if it makes intelligent decisions (which no computer will ever be capable of without sentience), it has to be programmed by an outside agent (human or even a super-computer), whereas a sentient being is self-directed, and (b) a computer must always perform using instructions in order to communicate, whereas a sentient being, can still express in silence - through kinesics (body lanaguage), oculesics (eye language) and proxemics (distance).
Philosophy and sentience
In the philosophy of consciousness, "sentience" can refer to the human ability to have subjective perceptual experiences, or "qualia". This is distinct from other aspects of the mind and consciousness, such as creativity, intelligence, sapience, self-awareness and intentionality (the ability to have thoughts that mean something or are "about" something). Sentience is a more general concept than consciousness, which is often used to imply a form of sentience that includes a sense of time, place and self.
Some philosophers, notably Colin McGinn, believe that sentience will never be understood, a position known as New Mysterianism. They do not deny that most other aspects of consciousness are subject to scientific investigation but they argue that subjective experiences will never be explained; i.e., sentience is the only aspect of consciousness that can't be explained. Other philosophers (such as Daniel Dennett) disagree, arguing that all aspects of consciousness will eventually yield to scientific investigation.
Sentience quotient
The Sentience Quotient concept was introduced by Robert A. Freitas Jr. in the late 1970s. It defines sentience as the relationship between the information processing rate of each individual processing unit (neuron), the weight/size of a single unit and the total number of processing units (expressed as mass). It was proposed as a measure for the sentience of all beings living and computer from a single neuron up to a hypothetical being at the theoretical computational limit of the entire universe. On a logarithmic scale it runs from -70 up to +50.
Sentience vs. Sapience
The word sentient is often confused with the word sapient, which can connote knowledge, consciousness or apperception. The root of the confusion is that the word conscious has a number of different usages in the English language. The two words can be distinguished by looking at their Latin roots: sentire, "to feel"; and sapere, "to know." Thus, sentience is a subjective experience, while sapience is a somewhat more objective cognitive ability.
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