# Contested concept: sentience

_**What you are reading**: one contested-concept page in Deliberus's deliberation graph. Deliberus maps human reasoning — including claims that are contested, mistaken, or extreme — so that disagreement can be examined precisely. A claim's presence here is not an endorsement: the graph records that someone argued it, how it connects to other reasoning, and how far scrutiny has gotten. The metadata on this page describes the state of that scrutiny, not the truth of the claim._

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- **Contestedness**: semantic
- **Diagnosis**: This masks disagreement over whether consciousness alone, or valenced experience specifically, is what generates moral status. It also affects what a behavioural test could show.
- **Canonical**: `/concept/sentience` (data: `/concept/sentience.json`)

## Senses in use
- **Ordinary attribution of sentience on the basis of humanlike behaviour or outputs** — used in 3 claim(s)
- **Phenomenal consciousness generally, roughly equivalent to it** — used in 3 claim(s)
- **Valenced subjective experience such as pleasure or suffering** — used in 3 claim(s)

## Claims using this term
- [The behavior of Google's LaMDA chatbot was judged by the scientific community to be a consequence of mimicry, rather than machine sentience.](/claim/claim_0c796b42fa43.md) _(sense: Ordinary attribution of sentience on the basis of humanlike behaviour or outputs)_
- [Sentience is an inherently first-person phenomenon.](/claim/claim_1aa7fd468192.md) _(sense: Phenomenal consciousness generally, roughly equivalent to it)_
- [[Some philosophers] use the word sentience to refer exclusively to valenced (ethically positive or negative) subjective experiences, like p…](/claim/claim_24658c5a1048.md) _(sense: Valenced subjective experience such as pleasure or suffering)_
- [The resulting robotic brain, once every neuron is replaced, would remain just as sentient as the original biological brain.](/claim/claim_76d5cbc590cd.md) _(sense: Phenomenal consciousness generally, roughly equivalent to it)_
- [Sentience involves the ability to experience ethically positive or negative (i.e., valenced) mental states.](/claim/claim_b842d9e4f107.md) _(sense: Valenced subjective experience such as pleasure or suffering)_
- [In 2022, Google engineer Blake Lemoine made a viral claim that Google's LaMDA chatbot was sentient.](/claim/claim_d0f310285ea1.md) _(sense: Ordinary attribution of sentience on the basis of humanlike behaviour or outputs)_
- [[Sentience] justifies welfare concerns and legal protection.](/claim/claim_d2ea69dd2a2a.md) _(sense: Valenced subjective experience such as pleasure or suffering)_
- [Lemoine supplied as evidence [that Google's LaMDA chatbot was sentient] the chatbot's humanlike answers to many of his questions.](/claim/claim_d69aa66e1aec.md) _(sense: Ordinary attribution of sentience on the basis of humanlike behaviour or outputs)_
- [Phenomenal consciousness is roughly equivalent to sentience.](/claim/claim_fab0caf261da.md) _(sense: Phenomenal consciousness generally, roughly equivalent to it)_