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> I'm not sure I buy the "sentience without self-awareness" concept.

Honest question -- what do you think is going on inside of babies and children? Self-awareness as a developmental process is complex and relational, and takes many years. Our senses though are more or less put together by puberty, built up by simple interactions with the world.

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Rational self-awareness, sure. But I believe higher animals and babies have self-awareness in that they are conscious of their own perceptions. It's difficult to put it in words without falling in circular definitions, but the key feature would be higher brain features working on top of the low-level automatic reflex information processing.

Simpler animals like wasps and worms don't seem to have those, or have really simple versions; their behaviours look more like following hardwired programs reacting to specific conditions, not influenced by some inner "mind state".

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