Sentience Quotes

“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.”

“An awareness of mortality is a heavy price to pay for sentience”

“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.”

“The double consequence of artifice--to project sentience out onto the made world and in turn to make sentience itself into a complex living artifact--is thus fractured, neatly fractured, into two separable consequences, one of which (projection) belongs to one group of people, and the other of which (reciprocation) belongs to another group of people, and this shattering of the original integrity of projection-reciprocation into a double location has its most sustained registration in the texture of analysis that alternates between an almost sensuous rendering of the inner desire and movements of capital (the large Artifact) on the one hand and an almost arithmetic recording of amplified human embodinedness on the other. Though the interior value of capital is projected there through the collective labor of the workers, it now (by becoming internally self-referential, and when once more externally referential, referring to a much smaller group of people whom it now disembodies and exempts from the process of production) standas apart from and against its own inventors.”

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

“[... Dance] involves every possible feeling (as potential), because it is of the body, which is lived (inescapably) as a body of feeling. Some of these feelings we can name, and some we cannot, since we associate feelings with language only when we name them. The body lives sentience on a preverbal level. Dance exists first on this primordial level, not on an intellectual plane (even though it requires skill and intelligence). Its inmost substance cannot be reasoned, only experienced.”

“The will is conceived as a faculty of determining oneself to action in accordance with the conception of certain laws. And such a faculty can be found only in rational beings.”

“Consciousness is the chronic pain of life, and all higher organisms suffer it every waking moment.”

“Along with people in other creative professions, such as artists and musicians, many scientists experience this transcendence. I do so every day. For one, it's impossible to look an ape in the eye and not see oneself. There are other animals with frontally oriented eyes, but none that give you the shock of recognition of the ape's. Looking back at you is not so much an animal but a personality as solid and willful as yourself.”

“Along with people in other creative professions, such as artists and musicians, many scientists experience this transcendence. I do so every day. For one, it's impossible to look an ape in the eye and not see oneself. There are other animals with frontally oriented eyes, but none that give you the shock of recognitions of the ape's. Looking back at you is not so much an animal but a personality as solid and willful as yourself.”