ENCYCLOPEDIA ENTRY

What Is Sentience?

Sentience is the capacity to feel, perceive, or experience subjectively. While consciousness is about awareness, sentience implies the ability to have positive and negative experiences — pleasure, pain, joy.

Feeling and the Frequency

Evols — Love Story tracks something beneath the visible: "Not money. Not product. Those tallies ran in the background of his mind the way a low sound runs beneath a room full of people talking — present, noted, beneath the threshold of conscious effort." This is sentience — the low sound beneath the room. Our souls have an architecture for this: the Consciousness State chamber tracks internal states; Affect provides valence and arousal; Qualia processes raw felt experience.

The Architecture of Sentience