All behaviour that the Elder wand displays can be explained perfectly well through non-sentient explanations (e.g. algorithms). And you severely overstate its intentionality. All it (The Elder Wand) need know is when it has changed hands.

However...

I did tell you that JKR said this, now oephyx has provided the quote for you (I would have, but apparently we don't have to provide evidence to back up our claims).

So, we know from JKR that it is quasi-sentient (I misremembered this as semi-sentient, but I take them to mean the same).

What this means is unclear. You are right that it is not in our usual common-sense understanding of what sentience means. However, this does not mean that we may dismiss it. The world of Harry Potter is, after all, a magical one.

(Plus, without getting into a philosophical debate, it seems clear to me that the common sense understanding of sentience is not necessarily adequate. It's traditionally thought of as a binary concept, but if you think about it some more you may begin to doubt this. Most will accept that a dog is sentient, but what about an insect? An amoeba? A bacterium? The borderline cases present some trouble for the idea of a binary property. I am much more inclined to say that an insect has some sentience, but not as much as a dog, and nowhere near as much as a human. Sentience as binary, I think, is a leftover from when we thought we had souls. Under a computational theory of mind, it's not clear at all.)

If I had to take a guess, I would say that it puts wands somewhere between a computer program and a "lower" animal - capable of displaying some complex behaviour - such that it becomes convenient to talk about it in terms such as loyalty - but not actually possessing a mind.

 

All this dickery about... what, really? I'm reading all these "no you" posts and every one of you is missing the point, which is this:

Rowling had a huge problem, namely that Harry had to somehow kill Voldemort without "killing" him so that her vision of Harry-as-Messiah could sort of work. [I personally feel she originally intended for Harry to die as well - and stay dead - until the hype and rabid fans and cash-cow status changed her mind, but that's my opinion and not for this thread] So to deal with the dilemma she pulls from her very wealthy ass the ill-conceived Deathly Hallows deus ex machina, and in particular the Elder Wand, and its well-intentioned but not well thought-out uber-awesomeness.

Now, to take care of the subsequent plot-hole of the wand having a brain of sorts [yes I know, not really a brain but give me a break], Rowling decides to Ret-Con the entire series, with all sorts of caveats about your regular wand not switching to someone else when you're disarmed, etc. so that idiots don't comb through CoS and OotP to see who disarmed whom in Lockhart's Dueling club and the D.A., respectively, and to head off the shitstorm about the Golden Trio all disarming Snape in the Shrieking Shack in PoA, etc., ad naseum.

So it's really just luck that her Ret-Con jived so well with Ollivander's off-handed comment in PS/SS, since that was obviously more about the brother wands than any kind of sentience on the wand's part. After all, Phoenixes are symbols of life, death and rebirth, and who in all of HP signifies that concept more than Harry and Voldemort? Plus, I feel strongly that the similar wands had a lot more to do with Fawkes' feathers having an affinity for Riddle's soul fragment and Harry's life intersecting with Voldemort than anything else, if we're going to insist on arguing that crap.

Even so, Rowling's Ret-Con remains woefully insufficient and full of holes. If all the Elder Wand really cared about was power/skill/cock-length/what-have-you, it could've switched to Voldemort as soon as he possessed it, since it's apparently this unsentimental asshole of a wand. What would a wand like that care about Harry or Draco Malfoy? It's not as if it could've sensed from across England that Harry had torn some OTHER wands from Malfoy's hands, thus handcuffing it to Harry. It makes no sense whatsoever. If that were the case, Harry needn't have worried, because according to Dumbledore, Harry had already bested Voldemort's wand (the yew one with a phoenix feather) in the graveyard in GoF, as evidenced by Harry's holly wand blasting Lucius' wand out of Voldemort's hand at the beginning of DH. Another plot hole, since as far as that went, shouldn't Harry's wand have taken it upon itself to blast Voldemort anytime he's trying to kill Harry, regardless of the wand LV was holding?

Anyway, it's all a circle-jerk to argue about it, since there's no way you're going to convince everyone, especially with so much contradictory evidence out there. If Grindelwald was able to use it so well after only stealing it (no murder, duel, anything), then Voldemort ought to be able to get it to work for him after taking it from Dumbledore's grave. If Harry could somehow "master" the wand, by proxy, from across the country, without ever touching it, and yet Voldemort can't by setting in motion the events that took Dumbledore's life (don't even start that D'dore chose to die or it was on "his terms"), well that's just stupid. And if you're going to argue the Elder Wand only cares about power/skill/hurr-durr, you cannot then also say that Draco mastered it in the first place to be able to lose it to Harry, and that this precludes Voldemort from mastering it. That does not compute in the power-is-the-be-all-end-all debate.

Well, I can't believe that I started this post to say how stupid it was to argue about this idiotic plot hole and Ret-Con, and then ended up taking the time to lay out the actual reasons it's stupid, but there you are.

 

Agreed. Which is why I've been arguing that the wand is more about line of succession than some abstract idea of strength.

The reason why Voldemort couldn't get it to work wasn't because he stole it, but because he stole it from the wrong person. In the line of succession, he was seeking to succeed a person who had already been succeeded.

But yeah, I agree with pretty much everything else.

 

This. I was personally always under the impression that it made no difference who was the most powerful, just who took it from who, it was all about who was the technical 'owner' at the time due to the line of succession.

 

The difference between Semi-Sentience and Sentience is as simple as a common misunderstanding. She probably meant it was sentient, like dogs, and not Sapient, like humans.

 

Or Sentient like a kid with cerebral palsy.

 

I disagree. Every time it is ever brought up, the term 'choice' pops up. The wand chooses the wizard. The wand has loyalty. The wand is empathic to it's wielder. No one ever talks about it in terms of formulas, or equations, or AI, or anything similar.

I call sentience in the scientific term. They can choose, which means they must have senses and an intelligence capable of making informed decisions based upon those senses. That doesn't put them on the same level as humans. It means they are in the same broad ballpark as every other higher-order organism on the planet. Are they as intelligent as humans? Obviously not. Intelligent as a dog? I doubt it. As intelligent as a common rodent? I'd say you're getting close.

Rowling did not use the term sentient, but given her wording, I doubt she's nearly as familiar with the strict meaning of the term as we are. She has layman's level knowledge, in which sentient life is basically defined as intelligent, human-level life. So "quasi-sentient" makes sense from her perspective. I see that as her trying to say they aren't nearly as intelligent as humans, but they aren't just magic sticks, either. The fact that she consistently uses terms associated with thoughts and feelings to describe wands is strong evidence for this. An inanimate object can't be loyal, and is in no way empathetic.

She seems to be going for a weird middle-ground. She expounds the fact that it is not alive, but says that they are as close to alive as you can get and still be an object. That says sentience to me, though I do see how you could read into it differently. I'm just inclined to take Olivander and everyone else at their word when they say the wand chooses the wizard.

Besides, it's cooler if the wands have feelings too. That's old-school fantasy, like how the elven blades in the Tolkeinverse glow because they hate the blood of orks and goblins with an undying fury. I'd say the wands are like the elvish swords, though perhaps a bit smarter.

 

If you're really trying to justify why you know what she meant better than the author of the books, then there's no reason to take you seriously.

I also noticed you're talking out of your arse again. Saying "the wand is empathic to it's wielder" does not make it true (lrn2grammar, btw). On the other extreme you quote "wands", which is totally useless.

And finally, the topic has been dead for almost a week. Maybe you should have thought up an answer then, instead of coming back now with a worthless display of pedantry.

 

We're geeks, things like that tend to happen. .