Quotes About Sentience

#1. And this should not surprise us. The plunder of black life was drilled into this country in its infancy and reinforced across its history, so that plunder has become an heirloom, an intelligence, a sentience, a default setting to which, likely to the end of our days, we must invariably return.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

#2. Pockets of sentience glow in the cold, deep void of the universe like bubbles in a vast, dark sea.

Ken Liu

#3. What am I more than elaborate sentience?

Derek Parfit

#4. The most attractive habitats for synthetic sentience might be the vicinities of exceptional sources of energy - for example black holes, or even the neighbourhoods of large stars, which routinely boil off the energy of ten thousand suns. These are the destinations they may seek.

Seth Shostak

#5. They also,' Skaffen-Amtiskaw said, 'refuse to acknowledge machine sentience fully; they exploit proto-conscious computers and claim only human subjective experience has any intrinsic value; carbon fascists.

Iain M. Banks

#6. Materialism ends up denying the existence of any irreducible subjective qualitative states of sentience or awareness.

John Searle

#7. Sheer dumb sentience. Here

Kim Stanley Robinson

#8. So the force of the Self also travels through the psychic nerves and, pervading the entire body, imparts sentience to the senses, and that if this knot is cut, the Self will remain as it always is, without any attributes.

Ramana Maharshi

#9. The animate and inanimate creation all contribute to the true worship of God. All of creation must worship at whatever level of sentience they possess. Jesus said if men held back their praise, even the stones might "cry out" in worship.

Ed Buckner

#10. Should consumerism be the last thing we accomplish as a species, after all this evolution and the miraculous series of accidents that granted our sentience? Would that not be an utterly dull and inane end to our history?

Robert Wringham

#11. One of the many quotes on love ... Love can come only with time and sentience. We learn it as we learn language
and some never learn it well. Love is like a tool, though it is not a tool; something strange and wonderful to use, difficult to master, and mysterious in its provenance.

Catherynne M Valente

#12. Everything which endures can
only do so because Eternal
Consciousness gives it sentience.

Vimala McClure

#13. Its really important to understand the difference between sentience and consciousness, which are important for human beings.

Stuart J. Russell

#14. Nothing invests life with more meaning than the realisation that every moment of sentience is a precious gift

Steven Pinker

#15. Someone once said that one measure of sentience was how much energy a sophont spent on matters other than survival. Fiben

David Brin

#16. This gauntlet, flung down by a bullying, contemptuous universe that allowed human beings to grope their way to sentience just so it could put them in their place that bit more painfully.

M.R. Carey

#17. Out of our deepest memories come the forgotten forms of the past,
given new life by the living sentience of an ancient and eternal forest.

Robert Holdstock

#18. Souls are sentience, an essence born into a new body when the old one dies.

Jodi Meadows

#19. He had loved the library, and had felt, as a boy, as though it had a kind of sentience, and perhaps loved him back. But even if it was just walls and a roof with papers inside, it had bewitched him, and drawn him in, and given him everything he needed to become himself.

Laini Taylor

#20. Sentience is a means to the end of continued existence. Sentient beings, by virtue of their being sentient, have an interest in remaining alive; that is, they prefer, want, or desire to remain alive.

Gary L. Francione

#21. All thinking things fear. Sentience, perhaps, is facing that fear and conquering it rather than succumbing. A tiger will drown in a tar pit, but a man who can clear his thoughts may survive.

C.E. Murphy

#22. The architecture - the mind - is knitting together. It's sentience. Vague sentience. All these years of formulating machines that know something, while the secret is to create machines that don't know something.

Scott Hutchins

#23. This world inside which sentience has awoken, uninvited, is the stuff of all nightmares, a living daymare, a defiled experiment draped in ethical ugliness, and is it therefore any surprise that a child's first reaction upon discovering themselves alive inside it is to scream in absolute horror?

John Zande

#24. The plunder of black life was drilled into this country in its infancy and reinforced across its history, so that plunder has become an heirloom, an intelligence, a sentience, a default setting

Ta-Nehisi Coates

#25. Those created creations were treated like tools that talked, their sentience an annoying product of magic noise, by those little mortal demiurges who thought dominion a natural by-product of expertise or creation.

China Mieville

#26. Maybe thinking you're supposed to 'have a life' is a stupid way of buying into an untenable 1950s narrative of what life *supposed* to be. How do we know that all of these people with 'no lives' aren't really on the new frontier of human sentience and preceptions?

Douglas Coupland

#27. When people talk about the singularity, when people talk about superintelligent AI, they're not talking about sentience or consciousness. They're talking about superhuman ability to make high-quality decisions.

Stuart J. Russell

#28. You want to know what human sentience is? It's the only thing in the universe capable of doubting its own existence.

Foz Meadows

#29. The truth is, I'd give it all up, the sentience, the endowments, and I'd go back to Scranton and work in that damned store and stock fucking Pez dispensers for the rest of my life if it meant that I could still be with you until I die.

Jennifer DeLucy

#30. Consciousness is the chronic pain of life, and all higher organisms suffer it every waking moment.

David Marusek

#31. Intelligence is not limited to neural networks, Merrill. Indeed, half of human intelligence resides in our bodies outside our skulls ... The genius of the irrational ... This is the body's intelligence, not the mind's. Every living cell possess it ... [the] indomitable will to survive.

David Marusek

#32. The will is conceived as a faculty of determining oneself to action in accordance with the conception of certain laws. And such a faculty can be found only in rational beings.

Immanuel Kant

#33. All breathing, existing, living, sentient creatures should not be slain, nor treated with violence, nor abused, nor tormented, nor driven away.

Mahavira