Creatures like that will certainly appear sentient. They will respond to their worlds in ways informed by a delicate dance between what they detect in the external world and their own ever-changing bodily needs and states. This, I argue, is what underlies all the behavioral manifestations of “sentience.” We detect sentience in creatures (and potentially in robots) whose take on the external world is subtly but pervasively responsive to their brain or control system’s take on their own inner, bodily worlds and their own states of action readiness.
