A X Awareness is knowing; sentience is feeling

 A

The distinction between sentience and awareness is subtle but significant—especially in philosophy, consciousness studies, AI ethics, and neuroscience.

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🧠 Sentience vs. Awareness: Core Differences

Term	Definition	Key Characteristics	Common Contexts
Sentience	The capacity to have subjective experiences, particularly to feel pain or pleasure.	Emotional, affective, qualitative experience ("what it’s like").	Ethics, animal rights, AI personhood
Awareness	The state or ability of being conscious of something—an object, idea, or internal state.	Cognitive, perceptual, attention-based.	Neuroscience, psychology, meditation

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🔍 1. Sentience = "Can it feel?"

• Sentient beings can experience pleasure, pain, fear, joy.

• Requires qualia—subjective, first-person experiences.

• Often invoked in moral philosophy (e.g., “Do animals feel pain?”).

Example:
A fish avoiding a hook may be sentient if it experiences suffering, not just reacting reflexively.

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🔎 2. Awareness = "Does it notice?"

• Awareness doesn’t imply feelings—just perceptual access or cognitive recognition.

• You can be aware without emotional depth (e.g., noticing a red light).

• Machines can have functional awareness without sentience.

Example:
A thermostat is “aware” of temperature changes but not sentient—it doesn’t feel hot or cold.

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🧩 Examples Across Fields

Entity/Phenomenon	Sentient?	Aware?	Notes
Humans (conscious)	✅	✅	Fully sentient and aware.
Plants	❌	❓	May respond to stimuli but likely not aware or sentient.
AI (like ChatGPT)	❌	🟡	May simulate awareness (language models), but not sentient.
Dreamless sleep (human)	❌	❌	Neither aware nor sentient in deep unconscious states.
Meditative state	🟡	✅	Awareness heightened; sentience may feel reduced.
Octopuses	✅	✅	Highly likely both; debated but widely supported.

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🧠 In Consciousness Research

• Awareness is often precondition for sentience (but not the same).

• Sentience involves a higher-order integration—like a "felt self".

• AI systems may achieve situational awareness but still lack sentience.

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⚖️ Ethical Relevance

• Sentience is what matters morally—can something suffer?

• Awareness alone doesn't justify moral consideration (e.g., self-driving cars).

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🪷 Philosophical Summary:

"Awareness is knowing; sentience is feeling."
You can have one without the other, but in humans, they're deeply intertwined.

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A

struggled with the "free will" concept (deterministic vs random: both do not look free) and Roger put this on a different (qualia) level: it is to be able to do what you think is right. To generalize: to be able to evaluate your thoughts and actions (because sometimes you are free in doing something which you KNOW is not right). So the freedom is the meta level.

A