One of the many quotes on love. . . "Love can come only with time and sentience. We learn it as we learn language--and some never learn it well. Love is like a tool, though it is not a tool; something strange and wonderful to use, difficult to master, and mysterious in its provenance.
When people talk about the singularity, when people talk about superintelligent AI, they're not talking about sentience or consciousness. They're talking about superhuman ability to make high-quality decisions.
Out of our deepest memories come the forgotten forms of the past, given new life by the living sentience of an ancient and eternal forest.
The animate and inanimate creation all contribute to the true worship of God. All of creation must worship at whatever level of sentience they possess. Jesus said if men held back their praise, even the stones might "cry out" in worship.
Materialism ends up denying the existence of any irreducible subjective qualitative states of sentience or awareness.
If a being suffers there can be no moral justification for refusing to take that suffering into consideration. No matter what the nature of the being, the principle of equality requires that its suffering be counted equally with the like suffering - insofar as rough comparisons can be made - of any other being. So the limit of sentience is the only defensible boundary of concern for the interests of others. To mark this boundary by some other characteristic like intelligence or rationality would be to mark it in an arbitrary manner. Why not choose some other characteristic, like skin color?
