I'm not sure why self awareness, self reflection or any other of these cognitive traits is taken to imply sentience.. What do most people think that sentience is? I'd always taken it to mean that inexplicable thing that solipsists believe everyone else lacks. But everyone on here seems to think it's whether you meet some kind of intelligence threshold or something like that. In my understanding, intelligence isn't really related to sentience at all. You could be dumb as a brick and still be sentient. I don't think sentience is something you can even really observe as an outsider. You can observe your own sentience, but as for other people, you just kind of take it for granted that other members of your species are "just like you". I mean what empirical data could ever make you think another human (in the wakeful state) was not sentient?