Reply #51: Well, IMO that's what's so special about sentience.

[Terran]

It allows us to transcend the limits of the body. It is of the body but beyond it. I would assert that free will is an aspect of sentience. Creatures who lack sentience are controlled by their bodies, but humans can overcome that limitation.

The paradoxical nature of the above may well be what originally inspired the idea of the soul--the idea that there must be something immaterial about us that allows to behave thus, because how could our physical bodies contain something that allows our behavior to transcend the physical? (That's just a thought, I'm not saying that's the reality of our being. I *want* there to be a soul.)