while I say what I've learned and internalized (over both a lifetime and intensely in the last three years) I also care how others understand them. For I'd refer you to Chap 2 of Theology and Sanity by Frank Sheed, a major work which illuminates clear definitions of creatures, all made of organic (plants & animals)matter that have internal energy & mobility, and inert matter (rocks, soil) that move by external energy forces; and of the existential difference between spirit and matter (inert & organic). Since that would take a long explanation I'll move along to your first question.
In organic matter there are nervous systems that register to nuclei in single cell life, and to brains (from simple to complex body systems) in the rest of the animal kingdom. Within those are a lower-to-higher range of sentience. But what separates sentient apes and humans from the rest is that they know they exist, and lower sentient forms others don't know they exist. The word sentience means feeling, so they do feel, but by only what has increased their survival, but they do not think, they follow intuition, which is not thought.
What separates humans from apes is a) that humans are aware, conscious, and not just sentient; b) that consciousness is not the same as feelings & emotions, and c) that they consciously invent language to collectively communicate and intentionally pass on what they learn to their offspring.
These have helped humans, in the evolutionary sense, to emerge at the top of the food chain. (This also reminds me of the 90's bestseller, Ismael, by Daniel Quinn.
Sentience evolved into human consciousness of its existence, then human consciousness of one's difference from the rest of creatures lower ranges of sentience and feelings. Spirit, however, is not a humanly developed concept. What we humans now take for granted as spirit, was a totally new thing to our earliest ancestor (I'm reminded of Luc Bresson's movie Lucy with Scarlett Johansen).
Spirit's existence is in recorded human history. It's in the most ancient of the West's writings, such that between the creation of Adam to the Flood (4246–2590 BC)human consciousness of an infinite being arose, and that those humans knew their creator, and then turned away from being at one with their creator.
The story is about how humans became conscious of an infinite being, and that they have the free will to choose what lengthens their life (abiding in the will of their creator) or to choose what shortens their life (living for themselves).
The story shows how their worst free will choice was to not take the advice of their creator, and so they lost "oneness" with the infinite creator, and then by knowing both good and evil, they learned of death.
They began to feel pain, sickness, the death of their god-given intellectual powers.
But before they died, they knew they must pass on, from memory, their story of what the perfect creation was like to their children and their children's children's children's children.
Most people only think of "The Fall," as a story, but it also aligns with evolutionary science, insofar as human science goes. Because science (finite human understanding) has no way of knowing that Infinite Existence Itself exists outside the evolutionary time and space for finite matter to evolve to create humans.
Existence Itself loved its own creation enough to reveal itself. How do we know. Existence Itself told us.
We current humans have been re-"evolving" through the arts and sciences and "spirituality" ever since.
ok I'll shut up... hope that's a satisfactory attempt at an answer (no worries... no AI bot has ever been consulted about any of what I've been studying)
= new reply since forum marked as read
