sentience

Sentience is the capacity to have experiences that feel good or bad, such as pleasure or pain. This positive or negative quality of experience is called valence, and sentience is sometimes distinguished from consciousness, which refers more broadly to subjective experience of any kind.

In animal ethics, sentience is often discussed as the basis for whether a being deserves moral consideration. In AI, the term appears in debates over whether artificial systems could feel pain or pleasure and what ethical consideration that would require.

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