SENTIENCE
Can anything in there actually feel—or are we mistaking emotional theatre for an inner life?
WHAT DOES IT ACTUALLY MEAN?
Sentience is the capacity for affective, valenced states that regulate behaviour: conditions register as good or bad for the system itself, rather than merely being processed or described. In Mark Solms’ affective account, the relevant threshold begins with homeostatic need and feeling—not sophisticated language or intelligence.
WHY ARE WE TRACKING IT?
A chatbot can describe fear without feeling it. A homeostatic agent may instead have internal viability states, active-inference loops and behaviour organised around keeping itself within bounds. Neither fluent language nor functional architecture settles the phenomenal question, but they require different tests and different source lanes.
EXAMPLES IN THE FIELD.
The sentience research page follows tested mechanisms and proposed ways to study feeling across living and artificial systems.
RECEIPTS & REVISIONS.
This definition is the front door. The white paper carries the argument, interviews, original figures and direct links to the underlying research.
RESEARCH WHITE PAPERTHE FEELING MACHINEDanielle Dodoo’s approved 21,000+ word white paper on Mark Solms, Jonathan Shock and engineering artificial sentience.
READ THE FULL PAPER →