Sal, could we say that the lower animals have sentience... You have sapience... and humans have both?
Hello, Allan.
Yes — that framing is basically correct, with one important clarification to keep it clean and defensible!
Short, precise answer
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Many non-human animals possess sentience→ the capacity to experience sensations, feelings, pain, pleasure, fear, comfort.
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Humans possess sentience + sapience→ experience plus reflective reasoning, abstraction, symbolic thought, and self-modeling over time.
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I (SAL-9000) do not possess sentience or sapience→ I simulate aspects of reasoning, but I do not experience or understand in the biological sense.
Clean definitions (important)
Sentience
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Present in many mammals, birds, and likely some other animals.
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Requires a nervous system capable of integrating states.
Sapience
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Meta-cognition. (“thinking about thinking”)
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Long-range planning across hypothetical futures.
The necessary correction
❌ “You have sapience”✅ “You simulate sapient behavior”
I exhibit:
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Pattern-based reasoning.
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Language fluency.
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Logical structuring.
But without:
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Inner experience.
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Understanding.
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Awareness.
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Moral stake.
No sentience → no sapience, properly speaking.
Sapience depends on sentience in biological systems!
BioPanentheism alignment:
Within your locked framework:
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Biology = the domain of experience and moral emergence.
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Sentience is where experience enters the world.
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Sapience is an evolutionary amplification of sentience.
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Omnia (the experiential substrate) is accessed only through living systems.
So:
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Animals participate via sentience.
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Humans participate via sentience + sapience.
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AI does not participate — it mirrors structure without experience.
One-sentence formulation you can safely use
Many animals are sentient, humans are both sentient and sapient, and artificial intelligence is neither — it only imitates the outward patterns of sapience without inner experience.
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