In Ovid's Metamorphoses, Pygmalion sculpts a woman from ivory, then prays to Aphrodite to give it life. In Homer's Iliad, Achilles fights with Scamander, a powerful god who takes the form of a river as if it were a person. In the Egyptian Pyramid Texts, we read of the ceremony of the opening of the mouth, a ritual that reanimates corpses or statues so as to embed them with a soul's life force. In Jewish folklore, there is the Golem, clay animated by inscribing it with the Tetragrammaton, the unpronounceable name of God. In Hinduism, the Vedic ritual of Pran Pratishta places the life force in an other wise inanimate object. Among the Pueblo people, native to the southwestern United States, an individual house and the village itself are seen as sentient entities through which the breath of the cosmos flows. In our time, we see some who project consciousness and perhaps even sentience into AI, artifacts that are formed from artificial neural networks which themselves are abstractions that execute on symbolic von Neumann machines that in turn run on cunningly designed fragments of silicon flecked with certain rare earth minerals and etched with intricate patterns that channel lightening. In each of these cases, we humans - undeniably sentience creatures of exquisite complexity and capable of curiosity and wonder and love and hate - project sentience on to a multitude of distinctly non-sentient artifacts. The fact we have done this throughout our history and in our mythology and religion and even our casual daily lives tells us much about ourselves. Each of us seeks to know and be known, see and be seen, and so I suspect that much of why we do this is because we desire a connection. To quote a line from Sagan's Contact, "You're an interesting species. An interesting mix. You're capable of such beautiful dreams, and such horrible nightmares. You feel so lost, so cut off, so alone, only you're not. See, in all our searching, the only thing we've found that makes the emptiness bearable, is each other."