To me consciousness is the ability to re-engineer our existing models of the world based on new incoming data. Sentience is the ability to do this in the abstra

To me consciousness is the ability to re-engineer our existing models of the world based on new incoming data. Sentience is the ability to do this in the abstract. I realize that this just shifts the discussion to "What, exactly is 'our existing models of the world'?", but I think that question can have much more traction, especially to an engineer, than the current state of the language over on the philosophy side. It also implies that there is a spectrum: the complexity of the model(s), the speed at which we can re-engineer them, our ability to hold multiple models in mind at once, and the degree of abstract indirection we're able to employ are all variable. I'd suggest that future work with questions such as "What defines a sentient being?" proceed along those lines, and using these definitions would be much more valuable than trying to stratify consciousnesses into various semantic tiers that still remain quite abstract.