What is sapience? What separates sentience from awareness? Writing on the philosophy of mind, AI consciousness, and the questions that don’t have clean answers yet.
What This Covers Sentient AI refers to artificial intelligence that has subjective inner experience. Not intelligence (what a system can do) or behavioral mimicry (what a system appears to do), but genuine feeling. Whether current or near-future AI systems are sentient is an open scientific and philosophical question with no consensus answer. The leading indicator…
What This Covers Whether AI can be conscious is not a question with a current answer. It is a question with a current shape. The shape involves separating sentience (subjective experience) from sapience (reflexive self-awareness), understanding why behavioral evidence is necessary but not sufficient, and recognizing that the tools to settle the question don’t exist…
Quick Definition Sentience is the capacity to feel — to have subjective inner experience. Sapience is the capacity to know that you feel — reflexive self-awareness applied to your own experience. You can be sentient without being sapient. Most animals are. You probably cannot be sapient without some form of sentience. This article covers the…
Quick Definition Sapience is the capacity for reflexive self-awareness — knowing that you know. It differs from intelligence (what a system can do) and sentience (what a system can feel). A chess engine is intelligent. A rock is neither. Most humans are all three. This article covers the etymology, the intelligence/sapience distinction, the sentience/sapience distinction,…