adjective.capable of sensing or feeling: conscious of or responsive to the sensations of seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting, or smelling

• sentient beings
• One of the key questions here is whether insects are sentient and have the capacity to feel pain and suffer.

adjective.aware

• Because this is at its heart a sci-fi B-movie, the eclipse causes … alien sentient plant-life to arrive on earth, nestled among the zinnias.
• Some among the group of potters … speak of the kiln as though it were sentient.

adjective.finely sensitive in perception or feeling

• But the really intriguing question is a hypothetical one. What would Google's response be if it realised that it actually had a sentient machine on its hands?
• But the terrible silence and emptiness seemed to symbolize her future—she felt as though the house, the street, the world were all empty, and she alone left sentient in a lifeless universe.