First, I will contrast the panpsychist, panprotopsychist, bio-psychist, and neutral monist views of the nature and existence (or generation) of sentience. Next, I will argue that the scientific explanation of sentience, as well as the conceptual unpacking of that notion, cannot dispense with a naturalistic emergentist perspective. The main argument is that the problems of the origin and explanation of the qualitative novelties associated with sentience cannot be avoided, regardless of whether one opts for a more discontinuous or gradualist perspective or whether one focuses more on the origin of sentience as such (however defined) or its many kinds or degrees of functional complexity (e.g., in bacteria, plants, animals, etc.).