Do you in fact mean ‘sapience’ (i.e. being, like Homo sapiens, capable enough to use complex language, pass on cultural knowledge to your children, have a high tech society, target nuclear weapons, etc. etc.)? Or do you really mean ‘sentience’ as in, being able to sense things (and perhaps also feel pain), i.e. something that (at a minimum) basically every multicellular organism on Earth more complex than a sponge can do? Or do you mean something else, like ‘agentic’, or perhaps something more philosophical, like ‘being a moral patient’, or something that people have and philosophical zombies somehow don’t? I think you might want to use a more specific or clearly-defined word, or, if you’re intentionally being vague, at least mention that you’re not using ‘sentient’ according to its standard dictionary definition of ‘able to sense things’.
I read it as meaning sapience in the sense you describe, although in a somewhat deliberately vague way.
I did a little dive into the meaning of “sapience” and “sentience” recently. Both are used in a variety of ways; their etymological roots are vague, so they don’t quite have a proper meaning.
It seems more common to use:
Sentience for feeling or having phenomenal consciousness. It is usually identical to being a moral patient of some sort.
Sapience for thinking, usually intellectual self-awareness and reflective cognition. I wrote a piece on this sense and why it’s an important threshold for AGI cognition: Sapience, understanding, and “AGI”
I think these are two valuable terms to have so I endorse using them this way.
Do you in fact mean ‘sapience’ (i.e. being, like Homo sapiens, capable enough to use complex language, pass on cultural knowledge to your children, have a high tech society, target nuclear weapons, etc. etc.)? Or do you really mean ‘sentience’ as in, being able to sense things (and perhaps also feel pain), i.e. something that (at a minimum) basically every multicellular organism on Earth more complex than a sponge can do? Or do you mean something else, like ‘agentic’, or perhaps something more philosophical, like ‘being a moral patient’, or something that people have and philosophical zombies somehow don’t? I think you might want to use a more specific or clearly-defined word, or, if you’re intentionally being vague, at least mention that you’re not using ‘sentient’ according to its standard dictionary definition of ‘able to sense things’.
I read it as meaning sapience in the sense you describe, although in a somewhat deliberately vague way.
I did a little dive into the meaning of “sapience” and “sentience” recently. Both are used in a variety of ways; their etymological roots are vague, so they don’t quite have a proper meaning.
It seems more common to use:
Sentience for feeling or having phenomenal consciousness. It is usually identical to being a moral patient of some sort.
Sapience for thinking, usually intellectual self-awareness and reflective cognition. I wrote a piece on this sense and why it’s an important threshold for AGI cognition: Sapience, understanding, and “AGI”
I think these are two valuable terms to have so I endorse using them this way.