Definitions > Consciousness
“Consciousness is exciting intellectually, but sentience is what is morally relevant.”
Subjectivity (or Consciousness) is the ability to experiment. Within experimentation I include the ability to feel pleasure and pain, but I also include having a point of view, being someone, perceiving, having “consciousness“.
manuherran.com/how-to-recognize-sentience
Manu Herrán: Let’s start with the very beginning. I’ll use the word sentience for experiences of suffering and enjoyment, and consciousness for subjective experiences in general. Not only pain and pleasure but, for instance, to perceive. Does it match your terminology?
Magnus Vinding: Yes.
Magnus Vinding: “Consciousness” is sometimes understood as “self-knowledge”, which one may seek to operationalize and measure in various ways, yet one obvious way is to ask whether an individual is able to pass the mirror test. Many non-human animals are evidently conscious in this sense.
But beyond that, it’s certainly possible for, let’s say, an invertebrate or a developing human child to feel pain without a very clear idea of what’s happening, without having any self-model. But that doesn’t diminish the moral relevance of the suffering itself, if it exists. Sentience, I submit, is ultimately what matters, or at any rate what matters most.
sentience-research.org/on–theories–of–sentience-a-talk–with-magnus-vinding
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