sentient

Meanings

1. 1
   adj

   endowed with feeling and unstructured consciousness

   the living knew themselves just sentient puppets on God's stage- T.E.Lawrence

2. 2
   adj

   consciously perceiving

   sentient of the intolerable load

3. 3
   adj

   Experiencing sensation, thought, or feeling.

   Consider fish, who are apparently sentient yet cognitively extremely primitive in comparison with humans.

4. 4
   adj

   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.

5. 5
   noun

   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.

6. 6
   adj

   Able to consciously perceive through the use of sense faculties.

7. 7
   noun

   Lifeform with the capability to feel sensation, such as pain.

Etymology

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