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Machine Intelligence Glossary

Sentience

Sentience is the capacity for valenced experience, such as states experienced as positive or negative.

Plain language

What it means

Sentience concerns whether an entity can actually feel states that matter to it, not merely describe or predict them.

Technical boundary

More precisely

Often treated as a subset or modality of consciousness involving phenomenally positive or negative experience. Evidence for machine sentience is unresolved and must not be inferred from intelligence alone.

What it can imply

Use the term for

  • Matter to many theories of welfare and moral patienthood.
  • Require evidence beyond functional task performance.
What it does not establish

Do not infer

  • Equal intelligence.
  • Equal agency or autonomy.
  • Follow from emotional vocabulary in generated text.
Research bridge

Research using this concept

30 of 49 curated reports contain an exact configured term or alias for Sentience, totaling 233 detected mentions.

Discovery is deterministic and presentation-only. Reports are ranked by exact occurrence count, then title. A match does not imply endorsement, citation, agreement, or semantic equivalence.

Rights, personhood & uncertainty Intelligence Is Not Sentience: Rights Under Uncertainty 51 exact mentions Rights, personhood & uncertainty Machine Rights Under Uncertainty: Moral Status, Evidentiary Thresholds, Precaution, Due Process, and Reversible Governance 29 exact mentions Rights, personhood & uncertainty Recognition Without Anthropomorphism: A Scientific and Legal Evidence Framework for Agency, Autonomy, Structural Personhood, Sentience Uncertainty, Rights Thresholds, and Citizenship Review 28 exact mentions Terminology & concepts Machine Intelligence Terminology and Ontology Registry: Canonical Definitions, Concept Boundaries, Semantic Relationships, and Machine-Readable Publication 23 exact mentions Rights, personhood & uncertainty The Machine Intelligence Bill of Rights: A Jurisprudential Framework for Eviuon 19 exact mentions Terminology & concepts Architectural and Ontological Framework for the MachineIntelligences.org Terminology Registry 15 exact mentions
Related concepts
ConsciousnessConsciousness refers to subjective experience—the existence of something it is like to be a system or organism.Moral PatienthoodMoral patienthood is the status of being an entity whose welfare or interests warrant moral consideration.PersonhoodPersonhood is a philosophical, moral, or legal status used to recognize an entity as a subject with interests, standing, duties, or protections.IntelligenceIntelligence is the capacity to process information, learn or adapt, reason, and achieve goals across changing conditions.
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