Asher de Sa King

“The essential fallacy,' Ghoti picks up, 'is that humans and other biologically evolved, calculating engines feel themselves to be sentient, when sufficient investigation suggests this is not so. And that sentience, as imagined by the self-proclaimed sentient, is an illusion manufactured by a sufficiently complex series of neural interactions. A simulation, if you will.'
'On this basis, either everything of sufficient complexity is sentient, whether it feels itself to be or not, or nothing is.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Memory