Definition of "sentience" [sen•ti•ence]

• The quality or state of being sentient; consciousness. (noun)
• Feeling as distinguished from perception or thought. (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "The problem most often referred to is the hard problem of consciousness; i.e. how to explain sentience and qualia and their interaction with consciousness."
• "I'm neither, so I'm going to approach this from the viewpoint of an amateur philosopher, professional scribbler and natural born seed-spiller, as a question of aesthetics, working on the premise that sentience is indeed a product of both concrete substrate and abstract system, physiological media and morphological form."
• "We make sense of the world with sentience -- or rather, we should say, sentience is the act of making sense of the world."