Wru from ? We said the pledge as a kid in the 90 s in CA <| sep |> How is a temporarily unconscious person sentient ? They don ' t feel or think things . If sentience of an organism depended on whether it could think or feel at a different time , then perhaps a dead body is sentient , or a sperm cell is sentient . Maybe even oxygen in the air is sentient because at some point it is probably part of a thinking , feeling organism . Maybe it is only sentient if it ' s capable of thinking or feeling within a day then sleeping humans can be sentient . Or maybe a month , for those people with comas to be sentient . Maybe a year or a few years so that we can know for sure that babies are sentient . This argument is not very compelling .