Jun 20, 2022
The key difference here is that "life" could be conceivably defined in external, measurable terms.
Sentience by definition is about an internal life that can only really be experienced by the entity that has sentience, making it a much less sensible thing to study.
Studying the brain to understand sentience requires you to make functionalist or materialist [0] [1] assumptions—which I wouldn't do because they're baseless, even though they seem sensible on their face.
[0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/functionalism
