Sentience and Place: Towards More-than-Human Cultures

Expectations for the future can differ greatly. Some await a  technical utopia that will support harmonious and easy lives.  Others predict a global ecosystem collapse that will threaten  the future of humans as species. Both camps make appeals  to sentience in support of their stories. Addressing this discordance,  this paper combines narratives in ecology and  technology to ask what roles sentience might play in future  places. In response, it hypothesizes that an understanding of  sentience as an inclusive, relational and distributed phenomenon  can promote more-than-human cultures and contribute  to the wellbeing of heterogenous stakeholders on the Earth  and beyond. To test this hypothesis, the paper outlines biological  understandings of sentience (as applied especially to  humans, animals and other lifeforms), contrasts them with  the interpretations of sentience in artificial entities (including  robots and smart buildings), gives an example of attempts  at sentience in architectural design and discusses how  sentience relates to place. The paper’s conclusion rejects the  dualism of technophilic and biophilic positions. As an alternative,  the paper outlines sentience as a foundation for richly  local more-than-human cultures that have intrinsic value and  can help in the search for preferable futures.