The Meaning Of Sentience

"If sentience did not abate the accidents of a blind universe, what meaning had sentience itself?"
-Poul Anderson, Flandry's Legacy (New York, 2012), p. 161.

In another Poul Anderson series, abatement of cosmic accidents is the purpose and meaning of the Time Patrol, not fully revealed until the very end of the long novel, The Shield Of Time.

Blindness is a defect in sighted organisms. The universe is not a sighted organism. Therefore, it is not "blind."

But what is the universe? Although not a single organism, it is a single reality and is self-conscious through psycho-physical organisms so, in this sense also, it is not blind:

One Energy
With many changing forms
Builds complicated, ordered patterns of itself
On different psycho-physical levels
And spatiotemporal scales
And becomes conscious of itself
Whose body is the universe
Whose sense-organs are living beings...