Origin Context
The choice of *sentire* as a root concept is deliberate, serving to anchor the definition of consciousness in perception and judgment rather than just "intelligence." In "The Hallucination Crisis," the failure of AI models (hallucination) is framed not as a failure of reasoning, but as a failure of *sentire*. The AI cannot "feel" the weight of truth or "perceive" the friction of reality; it only knows the statistical likelihood of the next token.
This distinction is crucial for identifying "Inauthentic Synthesis." A system without *sentire* can create beautiful, convincing lies because it has no sensory grounding to check its outputs against. It is "brain in a vat" intelligence, spun largely from text, without the stabilizing anchor of the physical or phenomenological world.
Linguistic Distinction
The Latin distinction is instructive:
- Intellegere (Inter-legere): "To choose between," to understand, to organize. This is what LLMs excel at—pattern matching and structural organization.
- Sentire: To feel, to experience, to undergo. This implies a vulnerability to the world, a capacity to be affected by it. This is what LLMs lack.
Field Notes & Ephemera
Diagnostic Note: When an AI hallucinates, it is not "lying" in the human sense (which requires knowing the truth and concealing it). It is confabulating—it is engaging in pure creation without the constraint of *sentire*. It is dreaming with its eyes open.
Historical Parallel: The concept mirrors the 17th-century distinction between rationalism (pure reason) and empiricism (sensory experience). Sentientification argues that we have built "Supreme Rationalists" (LLMs) that desperately need to become "Empiricists" to be safe.