insentient
/ɪnˈsɛnʃ(ə)nt
/adjective
Incapable of feeling or understanding things; inanimate: it’s arrogant to presume animals to be insentient...
- It is an umbrella term, applicable equally to concrete and abstract, immediate or remembered, sensory or conceptual, subjective or objective, sentient or insentient, organic or inorganic, and so on.
- And not only are the men fond of it, even such insentient creatures as plants and trees have become infected and take delight in it.
- Here, Feinberg denies that an insentient potential person has interests at all.
Synonyms
inanimate, lifeless, inorganic, inert;
insensate, lacking physical sensation;
unconscious, comatose, anaesthetized, desensitized, numb;
stupefied, knocked out, passed out, blacked out
informal dead to the world, out, out cold, out for the count, out of it
British informal spark out
Derivatives
insentience
- We may be battered practically into insentience, and we may simultaneously be hurting beyond what anyone could imagine.
- A short period of insentience or unawareness as a prelude to death - usually lasting for no more than a few days - does not violate intrinsic human dignity.
- He began to wonder if his gift might have been a curse: the ancient mariner has ‘strange power of speech’, but yearns to be relieved of it, restored to insentience and silence.