Quotes About Sentience

Without a heart the animal is very very kind so kind it wouldn't like a soul and couldn't use a mind.

Somewhere around 2136, various lines of development had collided. What had once been servile Borderline Intelligences had jumped the tracks into genuine sentience. The luminously clever engines of Transgressive intelligence had been much too clever, much too willing to oblige. In an instant, humanity had found itself in possession of tools powerful enough to remake entire worlds, but equally capable of shattering them to dust.

When fish experience something that would cause other animals physical pain, they behave in ways suggestive of pain, and the change in behaviour may last several hours.

I was born at a time when the idea of a chimpanzee getting a hearing in a court of law seemed totally absurd. By the time you're my age, we'll wonder how we ever denied such animals their standing as intelligent creatures.

There is something in animals beside the power of motion. They are not machines; they feel.

Before the computer, the animals, mortal though not sentient, seemed our nearest neighbors in the known universe. Computers, with their interactivity, their psychology, with whatever fragments of intelligence they have, now bid for this place.9 The

I wanted to curl up into a fetal position and start sucking my thumb, let my tears and dripping saliva pool under me. Sorry. I tried living, tried being sentient. Can't do it. Can't live in the same universe with that.

She thanked the toilet, but it did not respond. That was good—if she started to think of it as a sentient being, it would probably be much harder to poop in its mouth.

What is imagining like? Like being a plant. What is imagining? It is not-perception: it is instead the quasi-percipient, slightly percipient, almost percipient, not yet percipient, after-percipient of perceptual mimesis. Like the rolled-back pale peach of the daylily Oakleigh, it is not sentience but sentience rolled back.

I just don't like killing creatures.

The question is not, 'Can they reason?' nor, 'Can they talk?' but rather, 'Can they suffer?'

Is a virus self-aware? Nyet. How about oyster? I doubt it. A cat? Almost certainly. A human? Don't know about you, tovarishch, but I am.

Sheer dumb sentience.

Everyone at every minute of his life must feel something. Only the dead have no sensations.

Any feeling is both mental and physical~

The forest is like a sentient creature drawing breath around me. The moon's brightness has a sound. It rings in the sky. I've had a fever, which has been hard, but it has left my mind clearer than before. There's another way of seeing the world, like looking through the bottom of a glass.

We do sometimes pity creatures that have none of the feeling either for themselves or others

Consciousness is the state of awareness, or sentience. It begins in the morning when we wake up, and it continues all day until we go to sleep again at night, or otherwise become unconscious.

The crucial task of old age is balance: keeping just well enough, just brave enough, just gay and interested and starkly honest enough to remain a sentient human being.

Stars, rocks and rivers are not sentient. They move, but do not act. They do not seek opportunities or avoid threats. They do not feel or think. If they do, we do not know, as they cannot express themselves, or at least we cannot fathom their responses. They do not seem to experience death, as they do not demonstrate any struggle for life. Even

Life is as dear to a mute creature as it is to man. Just as one wants happiness and fears pain, just as one wants to live and not die, so do other creatures.

You, the Elder Folk, like to say that hatred is alien to you, that it is a feeling known only to humans. But it is not true. You know what hatred is and are capable of hating, you merely evince it a little differently, more wisely and less savagely. But because of that it may be more cruel.

Intelligence is the ability to solve problems, whereas consciousness is the ability to feel things such as pain, joy, love, and anger. Throughout history, intelligence always went hand in hand with consciousness.

Why, if it weren't for this 'internal illumination' [i.e., sentience] the world would be nothing but a pile of dirt!