I don't think delineating concepts is inherently good or intellectually valuable. Does the concept of a "barbarian" or "savage" help us better understand foreign cultures? Not really: if anything it does the opposite since it assumes these people are without culture or somehow lesser and not worth learning from. Similarly, I believe that dividing animal intelligence into "sapient" and "non-sapient" has no purpose other than to make us less interested in studying the non-sapient ones.
It's intellectually close-minded in that it presumes that a certain kind of intelligence is qualitatively different from another in a judgmental way.
edited 23rd Jul '16 1:26:29 PM by Clarste
I mean, you can study animal tool use and do tests for logical reasoning and whatnot, and that's all very interesting, but at what part of that does the concept of "sapience" enter the picture? Was that even necessary? You could easily divide animals into "tool-using" and not, or "abstract reasoning" and not, but what's the purpose of tying that to a loaded word like "sapience" which was coined before those experiments were done? It's going about it entirely backwards: trying to use recent studies to justify a category that we had already decided existed a priori.
Even "reasoning" itself can be thought of as a quantitative rather than qualitative property: I've seen studies that show that different animals are capable of planning different numbers of distinct "steps" into the future. Maybe humans are at 1,000,000 and cockroaches are at 1, but that doesn't mean we need a concept of "sapience" to talk about this.
edited 23rd Jul '16 1:48:39 PM by Clarste
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I hate connotations, because they seem to confuse people. Barbarian is a great example. How many barbarians are there? Trick question. There are no true barbarians, because there is a connotation attached to the definition of the word. As no one fits the connotation, there are no barbarians.
Because the reason words like that are bad is not the reason you identified, your reason needs a new supporting argument.
I dislike the assumptions you are making there. Please stop assuming we are going to do all those bad things with the word after we define it.
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I don't think there is anyone on this thread who wants to use sapience in order to argue something. Just about ten people complaining that that is what people always do. I don't see those people here, and invoking their bad argumentation style feels like a straw man to me.
However, this thread is about defining sapience. Or it was.
Barbarians are civilizations that don't have a written language. I am declaring this right now. Okay, now it's perfectly empirical and neutral so we should all start using it like that right away. Or... not? Because that's stupid and there's no reason for anyone else to care what I just declared. "Barbarian" is an obsolete cultural concept that only has any meaning at all because people in the past viewed the world in a particular way.
Similarly, defining sapience after-the-fact has no actual purpose other than to connect it to the connotations it already has, which is that humans are special and animal intelligence is to be measured solely in comparison to humans.
edited 23rd Jul '16 2:37:24 PM by Clarste
I actually do agree the term "sapience" is largely meaningless, but I don't think trying to discover how the connotations that goes with it aren't meaningless, if that makes sense.
Like, you can argue that there is no difference between intelligence and mental faculties between humans and other animals or between themselves, but that's is observably not true.
I think looking at this, not so much to see what is more like us, because a lot of the animals usually discussed when talking about this subject diverged from our common ancestor a long time ago, but what makes them...tick in a way similar to we do, without it actually necessarily being related is a worthy endeavor.
Like, I agree that it shouldn't be defined just to go "This species isn't sapient so we can just kill them all" or anything like that, I think asking the question can help us better understand ourselves and the other creatures in the world.
But, that's the problem... we can't draw that line. Take chimps and bonobos. If what separates them from us is that they adapted to rainforests and not having a pinching mechanism... yet have all the basic framework to do all we do (which they do, by the by) — how are they not sapient? What of baboons: our fellow plains apes?
How far back do you want to go to prove we're extra special animals with whom nobody else can possibly compare? And, how can you prove some distant ancestor wasn't doing this kind of thing with two sticks well before we left the rainforest and decided to give grass a go (we got the grip to do fighting like that, alongside punching, probably very early in the Australopiths)? And, how fundamentally different is it from too stags locking antlers, anyway?
edited 23rd Jul '16 3:14:04 PM by Euodiachloris
Honestly, I think you're just getting too hung up about the word. If there was way to express the same (vague) concept in a short an concise way, I'd probably ask that the title be changed. But, to my knowledge there is not, and you should have a clear enough idea of what this discussion is actually supposed to be about, without harping on the term itself.
And your entire post is predicated on a claim I never made. Sure, a lot of other people have, but this thread was never supposed to be about proving how humans are "more special" than every other species.
edited 23rd Jul '16 2:50:46 PM by LSBK
It could very easily be argued that because it's not completely clear it should be discussed. You know, to actually make it clear.
Because even if there is no exact guidelines, you should have a generally understanding of what people are trying to talk about. Otherwise there's no point in even being a part of the discussion.
edited 23rd Jul '16 3:00:06 PM by LSBK
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But, that's the whole problem with the word. That's the baggage it's had since day one. Asking if the other can think about themselves as well as we can about ourselves.
Those are the philosophical roots. The Greek philosophers tended to think other peoples couldn't think straight. Particularly helots.
edited 23rd Jul '16 3:04:08 PM by Euodiachloris
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Well, that's exactly what I meant with the arbitrary declaration of what a Barbarian is. I mean, of course we could all come to a consensus on what we mean by Sapience (when used in this thread, not in general) but the term is so loaded with connotations and preconceptions that it doesn't seem productive to do so, rather than simply using more specific language to indicate exactly what you mean.
Not to mention that we're assuming a priori that there is something we can agree to call sapience that animals may or may not possess. The thread could have easily been called "Animal Intelligence" but it wasn't, because you thought it was more interesting to discuss whether or not animals had some vague undefined thing.
edited 23rd Jul '16 3:05:41 PM by Clarste
I don't really think there's some concrete moral thing that makes it wrong to eat (dead) humans any more than I believe there's something morally wrong with eating animal flesh just because can theoretically live without it.
But it seems patently obvious why we don't farm/hunt people to harvest human meat. Cultural taboos probably develop for the same reason that going around eating people probably isn't good for the society.
edited 23rd Jul '16 4:31:39 PM by LSBK
Cannibalism taboos are probably related to disease: nothing is more likely to have parasites that affects humans than another human. Not to mention prion diseases.
As for human meat ranches... well, yeah, that's pretty obvious. Even if you really wanted to for whatever reason, it's just not worth the trouble compared to other livestock. Humans fight back pretty viciously for how little meat they have on them.
edited 23rd Jul '16 4:19:39 PM by Clarste
There are a few concrete moral things that have to do with not eating dead humans.
The most concrete is the wishes of the departed. If they asked to not be eaten, much as I did on the last page. That is usually respected. I would have a problem with someone who didn't respect that.
Likewise, roadkill is an ususual category of animal flesh. If my vow to not touch meat weren't a religious grade vow, I'd have no problem consuming roadkill. Contrast to most people who have more problem touching roadkill than normal butchershop fare.
Fine, but assuming for whatever reason you were okay with being eaten after death, and actually felt the need to express that, that wouldn't make it anymore legal to actually eat you. And most people would probably still find it repugnant of anyone who wanted to.
And, less sentimentally, after you are dead what you want only matters if the people around you who are still alive care. The dead can't care about things. Well, that's assuming there's no life after death, but that's an entirely different conversation. But even assuming that context it seems pretty safe to say you wouldn't be able to say or do anything about it.
edited 23rd Jul '16 4:36:08 PM by LSBK
Well, I can actually answer one of those. There was this one hippy who willed to be barbecued and eaten after death. And one of the people I know in school attended the barbecue. And ate human flesh. Back then, I was transitioning to vegetarian. But I think I would have found the whole thing gross myself. I definitely didn't find the participant to be gross.
Eating the dead hasn't always been taboo. There's more than enough evidence of tools being used to deflesh and crack human bones going back to... Well, the first tools. And, ritual cannibalism of the revered dead was alive and well in parts of the world well into the C20th... until it was conclusively shown to tribal elders to be what lay behind their kuru
problem.
It's not that simple. It never is. -_- And, you can find human meat turning up in muti and bushmeat to this day: pygmies and albinos not only have medicinal worth, but they don't count as traditionally people. <_< (One gets called a kind of chimp; the other a kind of made-thing spirit-animal disguised in human shape — very powerful. Heck, other clans and tribes will be considered subhuman, depending on the tales and histories being run with.)
People aren't very nice when they dehumanize humans, let alone depeopling animals. :/ But, there is a degree of survival strategy in it: a culture that gets super-picky about eating its dead or going all Cold Equation deserves not surviving a famine. <_< The Bush and Rainforest are not kind places.
edited 23rd Jul '16 5:13:02 PM by Euodiachloris
That's nice. But, political breakdowns mean famines can turn up anywhere. No exceptions. They're like busses: you don't see one for decades or centuries, then three show up in in quick succession. <shrugs>
You don't need a zombie apocalypse or nuclear winter: mundane human screw-ups for the win.
edited 23rd Jul '16 6:22:17 PM by Euodiachloris

It's a word like any other. We benefit from a more complete understanding of the world. To argue against it is to hold the antiintellectual stance that communication is bad.
However, the exact definition of sapience has no effect on how we should treat animals. So from that perspective, defining sapience is meaningless.