I also thought about AI in games, but for it to be equivalent, the AI should be able to have perception and/or control over the state of the AI itself, not merely about other game entities. E.g. some check like "stop reasoning if the inference process is taking too long to find an answer" is the kind of loop that would a process to have some kind of awareness about itself (specially if this was emergent behaviour, and not just a low-level pre-programmed test).

I'm not sure I buy the "sentience without self-awareness" concept. First, defining it as "subjective experience" seems circular, and second, reflex actions like e.g. plants moving towards the light or reacting against a parasite would count as subjective experience; in the extreme, even a blind chemical reaction like fire could fall under that definition.