sentient

adj
/ˈsɛn.ti.ənt/UK/ˈsɛn.ʃi.ənt/US

Etymology

From Latin sentiēns (“feeling, perceiving”), present active participle of sentiō.

  1. borrowed from sentiēns

Definitions

  1. Experiencing sensation, thought, or feeling.

    • Consider fish, who are apparently sentient yet cognitively extremely primitive in comparison with humans.
    • Obviously, other morally relevant considerations would apply to the case of a sentient fetus, as by acquiring sentience it acquires interests and moral status.
  2. Able to consciously perceive through the use of sense faculties.

  3. Possessing human-like awareness and intelligence.

    • While I had heard such talk before, I had always felt that sentient robots were in the realm of science fiction. But now, from someone I respected [Ray Kurzweil], I was hearing a strong argument that they were a near-term possibility.
    • Not even a microbe? I don't want to blow up something that could evolve into a sentient species in a couple of billion years.
  4. + 2 more definitions
    1. Lifeform with the capability to feel sensation, such as pain.

    2. An intelligent, self-aware being.

      • The merpeople and the sentients who lived on the beach often hitched rides on these creatures, steering them by pressure on exposed nerve centers.

The neighborhood

Vish — recursive loop

A definitional loop anchored at sentient. Each word in the ring is defined by the next; follow the chain far enough and it folds back on itself. Scroll to it and watch.

01sentient02sensation03sensory04impulses05impulse06prompting07intelligence

A definitional loop anchored at sentient. Each word in the ring appears in the definition of the next; follow the chain far enough and it folds back on itself.

7 hops · closes at sentient

curated · pre-corpus. live cycle detection across the full graph is the next major milestone.

sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA