Sentience Vs Sapience, Difference Between These Words

This war of words is rooted in consciousness, and it is as abstract as you can get when talking about anything. Awareness of existence could not sound closer to philosophy, and despite hundreds of years of study and debate, the only thing that can be agreed upon on the subject is that it exists.

We are aware of ourselves, our emotions, and we are capable of introspection, imagination, and private thoughts, so we are, by definition, sentient beings. Sentience means possessing the ability to be aware of your feelings and others’ while sapience means discernment, insight, or, simply put, wisdom.

The origin of the word ”sentient” can be traced back to the 16th century when contemporary philosophers created it by deriving it from the Latin phrase sentienem, which means ”a feeling”. It was coined to help us discern between our ability to just feel from our ability to reason and think and wishing to compound it within an adjective.

On the other hand, ”sapience” was an Old French noun passed into the English language during the 13th century, and it originates from the Latin word sapientia, which means ”to be wise”. The most excellent and earliest example of the usage of this word can be found in present-day science books when elaborating on the subject of evolution. Homo Sapiens is generally recognized by most people outright, even if they have never visited a natural history museum. The word Latin word Homo means ”man”, but in academic and logical writing, it better translates to ”human being”.

Since we have addressed where these two particular words come from and their meanings, we must venture back and explore philosophy and how it is inherently intertwined with the themes these words carry. Cogito, ergo sum means I think; therefore, I am so in continuation, what is consciousness if not self-awareness?

What Is Sentience? How Does It Apply Onto Philosophy?

You have probably never heard of the word qualia, but it translates the noun ”sentience” as the faculty to experience sensations in Western philosophy. The word itself is defined as an individual occurrence of conscious experience. Your favorite song’s guitar solo, the smell of coffee in the morning, the pain when you stub your pinky toe with the edge of the bed is all qualia, and qualia are everything. We all experience subjective sensations, and we are aware of the root of these feelings; we can experience other’s feelings and have personal perceptual experiences to them all as part of our consciousness and our interior and exterior awareness.

A Religious Key

Now, let’s take a look across the hemisphere and distinguish on Eastern philosophy. We’ll find that sentience is part of a grander scheme with somewhat religious undertones. It is recognized as a metaphysical condition, a quality of understanding that all things deserve care and respect. One must be sentient to be able to suffer, and this concept is rendered across beautifully in the way they treat all animals and consider them sentient beings.

From the way the Hindi observe cows as symbols of life that are sacred and should be revered and protected to how reincarnation is a central theme to Buddhism, whose core belief is that karma influences rebirth and any living thing is either climbing up or down the ladder to illumination. It is undeniable how significantly palpable sentience is to these philosophies and religions as a whole.

What Is Sapience? How Does It Apply Onto Science Fiction?

On the other hand, sapience is wisdom and the will to act using experience, insight, and common sense to get the desired controlled result. It is a virtue perhaps not as complicated as sentience but equally valuable.

Now, if we can agree that sapience can be acquired and amassed through time and experiences, then we may also decide that sapience could lead to self-awareness or consciousness? This is where science-fiction takes the main stage at blurring the lines between these two similar-sounding words.

A Science Fiction Staple

For example, we can make a sapient robot using the most advanced shade of AI, and as such, it would be able to think, act, and solve all kinds of mathematical problems and the most complicated puzzles. It would be capable of understanding feelings, landing on logical conclusions, conducting perfect inference, and even carrying a meaningful conversation, but it would all be part of its programming.

In essence, this android can learn and use this acquired knowledge to perform its functions, but it would never have the initiative to do anything aside from the one being designated to it. It could never experience curiosity or the compulsion to do something for action or lack thereof. It would never experience boredom, it would have no desire to fulfill anything apart from completing an assigned task, and it ultimately has no real emotions. It is a sapient android, but it is not sentient, not only because it feels no pain but because it is not self-aware. While it can process human emotions, it would just treat them as modifiers of expected behavior. It would be, as a consequence, incapable of sharing them with others or internalizing them for introspection. It is not aware of anything outside of its serial number and how much battery it has left.

So, you can see how this is a reasonably exciting subject to cover in science fiction because sentience and sapience are correlated in such a way that they can start to merge under the appropriate scenarios. If this same robot we were speaking about were to last and experience thousands of years of interaction with humans, would it eventually become conscious? It is a difficult question, isn’t it?

What Other Uses Do These Words Have?

I’m sure you noticed how philosophy and science fiction have grasped a big chunk of how and when these words are used, but they are, yet, to monopolize the market for them. These words have many uses, and sentience or sentient, for one, is usually employed to connote the existence of feeling when speaking of living things.

For example, when we talk about our pets, we use it, given how conditioned they are to react to human behavior and have full-fledged personalities observed. You could argue that your dog is more sentient than a mosquito, but this is all perceived abstractedly because neither can tell you about their subjective experience, so if you can only observe the behavior of others, how can you know what others have in mind?

Contrastingly, sapience is applying acquired knowledge to the appropriate situations, and this word is more frequently used than its counterpart since it conveys much less ambiguity. We can call anybody or anything a sapient being or thing if we believe they have demonstrated this quality. It is but another word for wisdom and perspective, and it can be observed more concretely than consciousness ever could.

We can quickly call out when wisdom is being applied at a task and when it is not, and our sapience may come into play by looking for better ways for any process to occur. Using our acquired perspective and understanding of the situation, we can attack matters with cognitive insight even if we weren’t aware of ourselves and others.

Conclusion

These words are interlaced within the deeper floors in mind, and this is why there is still an ongoing debate about them. The subject of sentience is as complex as the mind itself, and it requires earned or innate sapience to tackle it. I am sentient of the strains of defining consciousness, and only by becoming more sapient would I be able to contribute.

I would say you have become more sapient and perceptive by getting this far, wouldn’t you agree? Imagine the sapience you will gain tomorrow and how that will, in turn, make you a more sentient and aware being.