[PrimeMcFly]

> We know that octopuses and many other animals are intelligent. We don't know for certain if anything nonhuman is sentient.

You are mixing up terms. All animals are sentient. Not all animals are intelligent. Only very few animals appear to be sapient. Octopuses are certainly one of the few animals that appear to be beyond a reasonable doubt.

[shaneofalltrad]

The confusion is how Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act 2022 determines this, with the wrong definition of sentient to determine legalities, even seeing news articles describing it as so, for example https://www.gov.uk/government/news/animals-to-be-formally-re...

[efitz]

The lay definition of sentience involves the ability to respond to stimuli, as you point out, but people involved with animal rights activism use the term sentience to refer to the capacity to suffer, which implies a sense of self.

Intelligence is the ability to acquire and apply knowledge- reasoning, problem solving, etc. This is readily observed in many experiments with octopuses.

[PrimeMcFly]

> but people involved with animal rights activism use the term sentience to refer to the capacity to suffer, which implies a sense of self.

Yes, I always have had a problem with that. They use it incorrectly, and most don't even consider the idea of a sense of self as relevant, only the ability to suffer, although the latter is only relevant in the context of the former IMO.

> Intelligence is the ability to acquire and apply knowledge- reasoning, problem solving, etc. This is readily observed in many experiments with octopuses.

Intelligence can be a property of 'dumb' systems though, e.g. slime mold and plants.

Octopuses don't just exhibit intelligence, but rather metacognition. They can think about themselves in relation to their environment and manipulate their environment to suit their needs, willfully and deliberately, and not in any replanned way.

They also are capable of mental time travel, the ability to beware of and plan for the future, not in an instinctual way such gathering nuts but on a short term basis in reaction to their environment and stimuli.

There are very few animals who exhibit these traits, and these traits are generally a strong indicator of self-awareness and intelligence to the level of at least a toddler.

[tiberious726]

Octopus' sapience is absolutely not beyond a reasonable doubt: many consider passing the turning test, or an even stronger form thereof to be required for sapience

[PrimeMcFly]

> Octopus' sapience is absolutely not beyond a reasonable doubt:

I mean, for the standard definition of sapience it is.

> many consider passing the turning test, or an even stronger form thereof to be required for sapience

Those many are wrong. There is nothing in the definition of sapience that would tie to to something as specific to humans as the Turing test.

[tiberious726]

The question the turning test was posed to solve is when does a sufficiently smart computer become sapient. What on earth is your "standard" definition of sapience?

[PrimeMcFly]

> The question the turning test was posed to solve is when does a sufficiently smart computer become sapient.

Yes, but it's a test for humans to interpret and judge. What kind of nonsense is it to think it should be used for an animal? A possibly sentient computer is going to be programmed to communicate in one of the human languages for obvious reasons, and animals don't have that luxury. I can't see why you would think a Turing test would be relevant to a discussion of animal sapience at all.

> What on earth is your "standard" definition of sapience?

Whatever Merriam-Webster or Oxford give.

[tiberious726]

Yes, we are homo sapiens, sapience is fundamentally a human question. This is why we even care about it in the first place: it boils down to "are some animals human too?" That's why we care about it so much.

Hilariously, this is the result I get from Merriam-Webster: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sapience did you even look?

[lupire]

Would you eat a Martian?

[PrimeMcFly]

> Yes, we are homo sapiens, sapience is fundamentally a human question.

No, it isn't. The word may stem from using humanity as a baseline, but it isn't limtied to humans at all.

> Hilariously, this is the result I get from Merriam-Webster: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sapience did you even look?

Yes, in the past. It's perfectly relevant. The definition redirects to wisdom and sagacity. I'm going to quote from the wiki entry[] on wisdom to demonstrate why the definition is precisely apt.

> Wisdom, sapience, or sagacity is the ability to contemplate and act productively using knowledge, experience, understanding, common sense, and insight.

These are generally the traits we find correlated to animals that we consider to be sapient, self-aware and capable of metacognition, e.g. elephants, chimps, crows, parrots, etc.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom