Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun The quality or state of being sentient; consciousness.
  • noun Feeling as distinguished from perception or thought.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun Sentient character or state; the faculty of sense; feeling; consciousness.
  • noun Specifically, in psychology, presentation regarded as immediate experience, without reference to its significance for thought.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun The quality or state of being sentient; esp., the quality or state of having sensation.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun The state or quality of being sentient; possession of consciousness or sensory awareness.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun the readiness to perceive sensations; elementary or undifferentiated consciousness
  • noun the faculty through which the external world is apprehended
  • noun state of elementary or undifferentiated consciousness

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From sentiens, present participle of sentiō ("feel, sense")

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Examples

  • To me sentience is an aesthetic system, a mode of artificing, the process and the products of that process, the materials and methods of creation, the acts of creation, and the resultant creations themselves, simultaneously and inextricably abstract and concrete.

    The Art of Life Hal Duncan 2007

  • We make sense of the world with sentience -- or rather, we should say, sentience is the act of making sense of the world.

    Archive 2007-02-01 Hal Duncan 2007

  • I'm neither, so I'm going to approach this from the viewpoint of an amateur philosopher, professional scribbler and natural born seed-spiller, as a question of aesthetics, working on the premise that sentience is indeed a product of both concrete substrate and abstract system, physiological media and morphological form.

    Archive 2007-02-01 Hal Duncan 2007

  • The problem most often referred to is the hard problem of consciousness; i.e. how to explain sentience and qualia and their interaction with consciousness.

    Backing Into an Evidentiary Standard for ID 2007

  • To me sentience is an aesthetic system, a mode of artificing, the process and the products of that process, the materials and methods of creation, the acts of creation, and the resultant creations themselves, simultaneously and inextricably abstract and concrete.

    Archive 2007-02-01 Hal Duncan 2007

  • We make sense of the world with sentience -- or rather, we should say, sentience is the act of making sense of the world.

    The Art of Life Hal Duncan 2007

  • I'm neither, so I'm going to approach this from the viewpoint of an amateur philosopher, professional scribbler and natural born seed-spiller, as a question of aesthetics, working on the premise that sentience is indeed a product of both concrete substrate and abstract system, physiological media and morphological form.

    The Art of Life Hal Duncan 2007

  • Review: At its core, the story of the AI gaining intelligence and nearing the point of sentience is a little creepy; skirting the lines of a horror story as it begins to transform Rathere.

    REVIEW: The Space Opera Renaissance edited by David G. Hartwell & Kathryn Cramer 2006

  • Current research indicates they developed the telepathy first, then, later, sentience, which is unusual.

    Time for Yesterday A. C. Crispin 1990

  • A sympathetic look dawned across her face, and the moonlight in its impossibility caught her eyes at the moment such that Jesus is illuminated with the idea of sentience from the momentary glimmer, and he again was adjoined with the bedsheets.

    Everything2 New Writeups Teresa Heinz 2010

Comments

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  • The light sheeting off the white verandah was irritating my eyes and the heat was an angry sentience. In spite of their irrelevance the details maggot-tickled my brain. From "The Last Werewolf" by Glen Duncan.

    March 21, 2012