Sentience

The Cost of Knowing

By: Dwayne Walter

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Paperback | 31 December 2025

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Sentience: The Cost of Knowing examines the psychological and existential burden of reflective awareness. Rather than celebrating intelligence or consciousness as unqualified goods, the book asks what it means to live inside a mind capable of memory, foresight, moral judgment, and self-recognition.

Across a series of restrained, tightly argued chapters, the work explores how awareness complicates comfort, how intelligence outpaces meaning, and how knowing more does not necessarily lead to living better. It considers sentience not as an achievement, but as a condition-one that carries responsibility, unease, and irreducible tension.

This book offers no consolations, prescriptions, or final answers. It does not argue that awareness is worth its cost. It simply accounts for that cost, and leaves the reader to sit with what remains.

Dwayne Walter is a Canadian writer whose work explores history, language, cognition, and the long arc of human thought. He is the author of several books, including works on Russian civilization, China's civilizational continuity, and human awareness. Sentience: The Cost of Knowing reflects his interest in the psychological and existential dimensions of reflective consciousness. He lives and writes internationally.

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