34 Quotes About Sentience

We are organisms, not angels, and our minds are organs, not pipelines to the truth. Our minds evolved by natural selection to solve problems that were life and death matters to our ancestors, not to commune with correctness and answer any question we are capable of asking. We cannot hold ten thousand words in short-term memory. We cannot see in ultraviolet light. And perhaps we cannot solve conundrums like free will and sentience.

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.

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.

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

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

Rigg laughed softly at Lisa’s deadpan joke, but she halted when she noticed the back of Lisa’s neck: the factory number had been shaved away, roughly and angrily. Frowning in confusion, Rigg gently rubbed her fingers over the scrape, and Lisa flinched as if it hurt.“If someone saw this, you could be scrapped,” Rigg said anxiously. “I know,” was the soft reply. “I believe freedom is worth that risk.

Sheer dumb sentience.