dear robot stories

glumshoe:

togetherweliveforever:

glumshoe:

isnt-it-tragic:

glumshoe:

stop saying “sentient” when you mean “sapient”

Can you explain the difference

Sure, but only specifically in a sci-fi context. Once you really start getting into philosophy of mind and biology, it gets confusing.

“Sentient” means to be able to perceive, feel, and/or be aware of the surrounding world – to have senses that allow one to experience things. Animals are sentient – they are able to hear, see, smell, taste, and/or touch. Plants are also arguably sentient, albeit in a much slower and more cryptic way than animals – but we don’t generally count them as such for practical purposes (I could… get into this). If you built a robot no more intelligent than, say, a goldfish, but it was able to see or smell or feel pain, it would be sentient, but not sapient. 

“Sapient” means human-like wisdom or self-aware intelligence – the ability to engage in complex reasoning and judgement. In sci-fi, it usually denotes personhood and identity. A computer could therefore theoretically be sapient, but not sentient. 

Robot stories are almost always about exploring the formation and value of consciousness and personhood. Star Trek is probably in large part to blame for “sentience” to mean “sapience” in loads of media – it’s certainly the reason I used to get it wrong! I lost count of how many times Data refers to himself as “sentient” when he’s describing self-awareness aspects of his personal identity – he even contrasts himself with his cat, claiming she is not sentient (he’s uh… wrong…). 

Data is, of course, both sentient and sapient. An android that can walk around and respond to the world around it, using artificial senses that allow it to gather information from its surroundings, is sentient. (Being able to analyze flavor, scent, and temperature counts as sensing – not just seeing and hearing). An android that can reason and form self-awareness is sapient, whether or not it has traditionally human-like emotions. HAL 9000 is obviously sapient, but his sentience is limited. 

Thanks! This is a really good explination and now I’m offended on behalf of Data’s cat. Of course he’s sentient!

But he may not actually be a cat, if you ask me… Spot deevolved into an iguana once and everyone pretended that made sense.

The funniest part is the Memory Alpha wiki trying to offer a Watsonian explanation for why Data doesn’t know the difference between sapience and sentience. The whole article on /sentience describes how “the words switched meanings back and forth between centuries”, explaining why different series use “sapient” and “sentient” for the same concept. It’s hilarious.