Quotes About Sentience

Gavin was not prey to the irrational hormonal urges of meat-a kindess for which he thanked his makers-but he was not without feelings.

There's nothing like being annoyed by different sentiences to make you really appreciate your own.

The furniture would have missed you? Furniture's knowing all right. Not much gets past the things in a room, I daresay, and chairs and tables don't go to the grave so soon. Every time I take the soft cloth to that stuff in the drawingroom, I could say, 'Well, you know a bit more'.

A child raised on a desert island, alone, without social interaction, without language, and thus lacking empathy, is still a sentient being.

We are not thinking machines that feel, we are feeling machines that think

We emerged into human-hood walking in nature. Our human brain evolved because we got upright and walked. Our sentience and awareness – the stunning and special stuff that sets us apart in the animal kingdom – evolved to the rhythms of walking and in response to the patterns in nature we saw when we quit schlepping around on all fours and began looking upward. Hiking brings us back to our nature because hiking is how we know our nature.

She was capable of suffering – that was the price of sentience.

There is increasing social concern about our use of nonhumans for experiments, food, clothing and entertainment. This concern about animals reflects both our own moral development as a civilization and our recognition that the differences between humans and animals are, for the most part, differences of degree and not of kind.

Schneider's characters, like Kundera's, are sentient and sophisticated figures at a time when the constraints of Communist rule persist but its energy has entirely vanished.

For all we know it, their pain may sometimes seem more immediate, blunt, arbitrary, and inescapable than ours. Walk through an animal shelter or a slaughterhouse and you wonder if animal suffering might not at times be all the more terrifying and all-encompassing without benefit of the words and concepts that for us, after all, confer not only meaning but consolation. Whatever is going on inside their heads, it doesn't seem mere to them.

The most striking quality that humans and animals have in common is the capacity to experience suffering.

I would stare at the statue's distant shape, perhaps daring it to do something—strike me down if it wanted, or show some other sign of sentience—and, after an uneventful interregnum, I would turn away, never with satisfaction. The statue seemed to mock me with its muteness and its immobility, as though offering the promise, if of anything, not of redemption, but rather of a reckoning, and at a time of its choosing, not of mine.

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

Once we have isolated the computational and neurological correlates of access-consciousness, there is nothing left to explain. It's just irrational to insist that sentience remains unexplained after all the manifestations of sentience have been accounted for, just because the computations don't have anything sentient in them. It's like insisting that wetness remains unexplained even after all the manifestations of wetness have been accounted for, because moving molecules aren't wet.

After all, other mammals fight to stay alive, appear to experience pleasure, and undergo pain, fear, and stress when their well-being is compromised. The great apes also share our higher pleasures of curiosity and love of kin, and our deeper aches of boredom, loneliness, and grief. Why should those interests be respected for our species but not for others?

Even the emotional comfort of a belief in an afterlife can go both ways. Would life lose its purpose if we ceased to exist when our brains die? On the contrary, nothing invests life with more meaning than the realization that every moment of sentience is a precious gift.

nothing invests life with more meaning than the realization that every moment of sentience is a precious gift.

But consciousness or sentience, the raw sensation of toothaches and redness and saltiness and middle C, is still a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.

Animals love and suffer, cry and laugh; their hearts rise up in anticipation and fall in despair...they feel.

We are not especially 'interested in' animals. Neither of us had ever been inordinately fond of dogs, cats, or horses in the way that many people are. We didn't 'love' animals.

Do your kind even know what love is? Can you feel anything at all, or is it just... programmed?

She and her sister were dressed in purple, with gold buckles at their throats by way of brooches, and another gold buckle each at the end of hatpins which they wore through their grey hair in order apparently to match their brooches. Their faces, identical to the point of indecency, were quite expressionless, as though they were the preliminary lay-outs for faces and were waiting for sentience to be injected.

Just because they're not humanoid doesn't mean they're not intelligent, Krisa. You can't label something an animal and just dismiss it as unworthy of respect

Los animales no son cosas y tienen alma y no son negociables ni manipulables y hay una jerarquía en ellos que se establece según la complejidad de sus sistemas nerviosos, por los cuales sufren y sienten como nosotros: la jerarquía del dolor.