Quotes About Sentience

I've always been skeptical of the idea that sentience is going to be an exclusively human attribute.

There are many people out there (me being one of them) who can vouch that animals have feelings; they feel compassion and love, as well as pain!

So, if an octopus is this smart, Steve asked Bill, what other animals are out there that could be this smart--that we don't think of as being sentient and having personality and memories and all these things?

The desire for stimulants following hard on the heels of sentience

Animals have no rights

Because animals are property, we consider as 'humane treatment' that we would regard as torture if it were inflicted on humans.

I don't like to eat octopus. They're so smart.

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.

Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal! Are you getting the picture?

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." While

Just as we reject racism, sexism, ageism, and heterosexism, we reject speciesism. The species of a sentient being is no more reason to deny the protection of this basic right than race, sex, age, or sexual orientation is a reason to deny membership in the human moral community to other humans.

We can no more justify using nonhumans as human resources than we can justify human slavery. Animal use and slavery have at least one important point in common: both institutions treat sentient beings exclusively as resources of others. That cannot be justified with respect to humans; it cannot be justified with respect to nonhumans—however "humanely" we treat them.

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.

To say that a sentient being is not harmed by death denies that the being has the very interest that sentience serves to perpetuate. It would be analogous to saying that a being with eyes does not have an interest in continuing to see or is not harmed by being made blind. The Jains of India expressed it well long ago: "All beings are fond of life, like pleasure, hate pain, shun destruction, like life, long to live. To all life is dear.

We would finally have to confront our moral schizophrenia about animals, which leads us to love some animals, treat them as members of our family, and never once doubt their sentience, emotional capacity, self-awareness, or personhood, but at the same time we stick dinner forks into other animals who are indistinguishable in any relevant sense from our animal companions.

We cannot justify treating any sentient nonhuman as our property, as a resource, as a thing that we an use and kill for our purposes.

I have no little insight into the feelings of furniture, and treat books and prints with a reasonable consideration. How some people use their pictures, for instance, is a mystery to me; very revolting all the same--portraits obliged to face each other for ever--prints put together in portfolios.

Self-preservation is one of the signs of sentient life.

The Curse works like this: Memory arrives in lockstep with sentience, with self-awareness. It arrives all at once, boom . A detonation. I'm a newborn handed this sudden bomb-blast of identity, this explosive memory of all previous lives lived all at once. Even as synapses struggle to form, neurons connecting with muscle cells.

Anyone who lives with a dog, as I do, knows that dogs are thinking, feeling individuals who do not deserve to be caged, scared and used as disposable test tubes with tails.

Even if AI surpasses us intellectually, we still may stand out in a crucial dimension: it feels like something to be us.

It's not like humans worry if they've hurt the feelings of their … toaster.

It's not about stupidity, or even rebellion-it's about feeling life.

There is no fundamental difference between man and animals in their ability to feel pleasure and pain, happiness, and misery.