sentience

n. ability to perceive sensation, ability to feel

Sentience refers to utilization of sensory organs, the ability to feel or perceive subjectively, not necessarily including the faculty of self-awareness. The possession of sapience is not a necessity. The word sentient is often confused with the word sapient, which can connote knowledge, consciousness, or apperception. The root of the confusion is that the word conscious has a number of different usages in English. The two words can be distinguished by looking at their Latin roots: sentire, "to feel"; and sapere, "to know".
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Noun
1. state of elementary or undifferentiated consciousness; "the crash intruded on his awareness"
(synonym) awareness
(hypernym) consciousness
2. the faculty through which the external world is apprehended; "in the dark he had to depend on touch and on his senses of smell and hearing"
(synonym) sense, sensation, sentiency, sensory faculty
(hypernym) faculty, mental faculty, module
(hyponym) modality, sense modality, sensory system
3. the readiness to perceive sensations; elementary or undifferentiated consciousness; "gave sentience to slugs and newts"- Richard Eberhart
(antonym) insentience
(hypernym) animateness, aliveness, liveness
(attribute) sentient, animate

(n.)
Alt. of Sentiency
  

Synonyms and related words:
affectibility, alertness, all-night vigil, consciousness, impressibility, impressionability, insomnia, insomniac, insomnolence, insomnolency, lidless vigil, limen, openness to sensation, perceptibility, physical sensibility, readiness of feeling, receptiveness, receptivity, restlessness, sensation level, sensibility, sensibleness, sentiency, sleeplessness, susceptibility, susceptivity, threshold of sensation, tossing and turning, vigil, wake, wakefulness