sentience n. 1

‘We are dealing with an utterly alien world,’ Midos Ken said several times. ‘There is sentience here—but sentience in no familiar body. We must be prepared to deal with manifestations of intelligence that are unfamiliar or even inconceivable to the human mind.’

A cold cloud of darkness followed after him, implacable in its alien sentience.

There is evidence that inorganic matter possesses a certain degree of sentience; that is, the atom may have consciousness and will, and therefore in a limited sense the power to control its own destiny.

His writings, even if they were entirely disregarded in his lifetime, demonstrate an enormous command of the problems of inter-system government. They show a sentience on the subject of politics which one regrets is not general amongst our modern gentry.

Corinth’s memory went back over what he had seen, the mountains and oceans and forests of whole worlds, the life which blossomed in splendor or struggled only to live, and the sentience which had arisen to take blind nature in hand.

She knew nothing of these Beta Corviki, but it was a convention among all the sophisticated societies she had encountered that sentience was not permitted to waste itself. Kira Falernova had found it excessively difficult to commit suicide.

When you died, your body stayed behind—but the sentience, the animator part of you, did not. This ‘self‘—the soul, if you will, although robbed of its religious connotations—is basically electrical.

Four or five billion years ago, someone built the first skrodes and raised the first Riders to sentience.

They might have been alien in their biology, inspiring a kind of visceral revulsion simply because they were so far from what the human mind considered the right and proper form for sentience.

Intelligence exists as the ability to recognize patterns. Self-awareness is intelligence recognizing the patterns of its own self. Sentience is the ownership of that awareness—the individual begins to function as the source, not the effect of his own perceptions. Even being able to speak of sentience in such a context is evidence of it.

A limited empathy might be taught and drugged and tech-linked in between two people, but that wouldn’t have been enough. The Ambassadors were created and bought up to be one, with unified minds. They had the same genes but much more: it was the minds those carefully nurtured genes made that the Hosts could hear. If you raised them right, taught them to think of themselves right, wired them with links, then they could speak Language, with close enough to one sentience that the Ariekei could understand it.