The Concept of Sentience

Abstract Sentience has broader and narrower senses. In a broad sense, it refers to any capacity for conscious experience. Conscious experience here refers to ‘phenomenal consciousness’, the idea that there is ‘something it’s like’ to be you. In a narrower sense, it refers to the capacity to have valenced experiences: experiences that feel bad or feel good to the subject, such as experiences of pain and pleasure. A definition of sentience as the capacity for valenced experience can be common ground, despite continuing disagreement about the nature of conscious experience and the nature of valence. We can hope that current definitions of ‘phenomenal consciousness’ will be superseded by more informative successors, but this must await much more theoretical consensus than currently exists. Valence, meanwhile, is one of the two major dimensions, along with arousal, that structure our affective experiences, and the one that matters most from an ethical point of view.