Measuring and quantifying
sentience

The Center for Sentience Research (CSR) is an independent Swiss non-profit building the foundational framework for measuring awareness across substrates. Bridging physics, neuroscience, and philosophy, we investigate three domains: biological minds (morphological intelligence and cellular decision-making), digital minds (whether and how sentience could emerge in non-biological systems), and qualia (the physical structure of experience and valence). This work is urgent. As AI systems increasingly present as sentient and as science reveals awareness-like properties in unexpected biological substrates, society needs rigorous, substrate-independent methods to evaluate such claims. Without scientific foundations, these questions will be decided by intuition, commercial interest, or ideology. CSR exists to provide the measurement frameworks before that happens.

The Ingredients

Researching the substrates of experience

Biological Mind

Investigating morphological intelligence, cellular decision-making, and awareness in biological systems.

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Digital Mind

Evaluating if sentience could emerge in non-biological substrates and how to measure it.

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Qualia

Formalizing the physics of experience, mapping neural entropy, and defining the structure of valence.

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