At least personally, my subjective experience as a sentient being includes having a 3-dimensional "virtual reality" view of the world around me, which is mostly

At least personally, my subjective experience as a sentient being includes having a 3-dimensional "virtual reality" view of the world around me, which is mostly informed by sight but also by touch and sound. I think this is a key element of human & animal sentience and I tend to think that all animals that have this "3D representation of the world" in their mind are sentient. E.g. fish can solve mazes, in a way illustrative of having a 3D view of the world within their minds like we do, so I think they are sentient. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/251359525_Performance_of_Betta_splendens_in_a_radial_arm_maze https://www.researchgate.net/publication/251359525_Performan... If you search Google for the phrase <you see with your brain not your eyes>, you will find lots of blog posts and the like, explaining with examples which I mean by the 3D VR-like world in your head which I am describing. Another commenter in this thread raised the question of whether robots that navigate the world are sentient. I think the answer is possibly yes but I'm going to give a huge disclaimer which is I don't think that sentience is morally relevant, I think what is morally relevant is whether an entity feels qualia or not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia In my personal view (just hunches really), I think that whether qualia are felt depends on the implementation. My hunch is that an implementation of a neural network in hardware, i.e. an actual network of transistors, might feel qualia, but that a software implementation of the same neural network would not. But others have different hunches and this is a question as yet unsolved by today's science.