Consciousness, Sapience and Sentience—A Metacybernetic View

Living systems are complex dynamic information processing energy consuming entities with properties of consciousness, intelligence, sapience, and sentience. Sapience and sentience are autonomous attributes of consciousness. While sapience has been well studied over the years, that of sentience is relatively rare. The nature of sapience and sentience will be considered, and a metacybernetic framework using structural information will be adopted to explore the metaphysics of consciousness. Metacybernetics delivers a cyberintrinsic model that is cybernetic in nature, but also uses the theory of structural information arising from Frieden’s work with Fisher information. This will be used to model sapience and sentience and their relationship. Since living systems are energy-consuming entities, it is also natural for thermodynamic metaphysical models to arise, and most of the theoretical studies of sentience have been set within a thermodynamic framework. Hence, a thermodynamic approach will also be introduced and connected to cyberintrinsic theory. In metaphysical contexts, thermodynamics uses free-energy, which plays the same role in cyberintrinsic modelling as intrinsic structural information. Since living systems exist at the dynamical interface of information and thermodynamics, the overall purpose of this paper is to explore sentience from the alternative cyberintrinsic perspective of metacybernetics.