Quotes About Sentience

First, people are born to worry. That's how we made it to the top of the food chain. Constant anxiety is the curse that comes with consciousness, with sentience. We're the only species smart enough to fear not only actual, present threats, but also a myriad of imagined threats. Worse, we're the only species burdened with the knowledge of our own mortality. And this makes us the most neurotic animal on Earth.

Factory farming is the attitude that commodifies sentient life.

I see myself as a professional feeler.

The raccoons, foxes, beavers, chinchillas, minks, rabbits, and yes, sometimes even dogs and cats that are killed for fur are not very different from your beloved dog or cat. They all have eyes, ears and hearts. They all experience pain when they are physically maimed. They shake with fear when they experience terror.

The most important of all rights is the right to life, and I cannot foresee a day when domesticated animals will be granted that right in law.

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.

You are words," the fireflies said. "Your soul is the poem. The struggle to make mortal words say the infinite unsayable is the struggle that defines sentience.

No one know precisely how sentient is a pinyon pine, for example, or to what degree such woody organisms can feel pain or fear, and in any case the road builders had more important things to worry about, but this much is clearly established as scientific face: a living tree, once uprooted, takes many days to wholly die.

The head, the chest, and the abdomen were the most commonly engaged theaters of feeling. They are indeed the stages on which feelings are created.

There are people who try to justify eating fish by saying they have no feelings. Well, you watch a fish gasping for breath as it's pulled out of the water, and then try and tell me it has no feelings!

The self is simply that warm single point of sentience around which the life of the universe gathers.

If we are prepared to take the life of another being merely in order to satisfy our taste for a particular type of food, then that being is no more than a means to our end.

É verdade, o cachorro morreu. Cumpriu sua sentença e encontrou-se com o único mal irremediável, aquilo que é a marca do nosso estranho destino sobre a Terra, aquele fato sem explicação que iguala tudo o que é vivo num só rebanho de condenados, porque tudo que é vivo morre.

One of the most consistent defining qualities of sentience is that we define it as human, as the thing that we possess that others do not.

I believe there is something going on in a conscious being, which includes many animals, as well as ourselves, that is not a computational activity. And to be conscious at all is not a quality that a computer as such will ever possess - no matter how complicated, no matter how well it plays chess or any of these things.

You can look at your dog and see that it's thinking and has strong feelings. And if it does, so do wolves. And if wolves do, so do elephants. People aren't the only beings that think and feel.

Although we have, in theory, abolished human slavery, recognized women's rights, and stopped child labor, we continue to enslave other species who, if we simply pay attention, show quite clearly that they experience parental love, pain, and the desire for freedom, just as we do.

When it comes to having a central nervous system, and the ability to feel pain, hunger, and thirst, a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy.

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.

Goddamn these sentiences, roared the tree with birds shrieking in its branches.

For is there anything so absurd as to delight in many inanimate things, like public office, fame, and stately buildings, or dress and personal adornment, and to take little or no delight in a sentient being endowed with virtue and capable of loving, and — if I may so term it — of loving back?

It is difficult not to wonder whether that combination of elements which produces a machine for labor does not create also a soul of sorts, a dull resentful metallic will, which can rebel at times.

We truly are all one tribe," said the iron-haired ghost softly. "Human, vampire, spirit, ghost—we're all sentient creatures bound to this planet. Why can't we work together in the face of something like this?

Sentience without senses. Blind, deaf, nerveless, moveless. Some irritability, response to touch. Response to sun, to light, to water, and chemicals in the earth around the roots. Nothing comprehensible to an animal mind. Presence without mind. Awareness of being, without object or subject. Nirvana. (p. 517)