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In the past we used the word "sentience" for this, but sci-fi confused "sentience" with "sapience," and now we have four terms that are meaningless, causing pointless arguments because different people interpret them in different ways.

- consciousness

- sentience

- self-awareness

- sapience

(It really doesn't help that 3/4 these are too poorly-understood to even have a good formal definition.)

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I'm okay to live and let live and not litigate differences here as long as usage is meaningful and contributes to precision (although it would be perfectly fair to insist that's exactly what's being lost here).

I understand, for instance, that for some people there's an important difference between morality and ethics, but modern scholarship in meta-ethics that is perfectly up to speed on this vocabulary sees no benefit to policing that particular distinction.

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