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by PrimeMcFly 863 days ago
> 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.
1 comments
tiberious726 863 days ago
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?
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PrimeMcFly 863 days ago
> 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.

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tiberious726 863 days ago
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?

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lupire 862 days ago
Would you eat a Martian?
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PrimeMcFly 863 days ago
> 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

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