Sentience is a lower-level of consciousness, and we typically rely on correspondence of physiological signals and self-reports to make a determination of sentie

Sentience is a lower-level of consciousness, and we typically rely on correspondence of physiological signals and self-reports to make a determination of sentience. In the absence of self-reports, we measure pain. I encourage you to look up the great consciousness debate (2022), for a nice review, but there will probably be many threads to follow from there. The neurophysiological model of consciousness is pretty advanced and can tell where its initial stages might be, but there’s still much to discern about the specifics (which is why it’s a debate). The hard question of consciousness is not so much about whether or not we’re conscious, but more about what makes us conscious.