Sapience
From SporeWiki, the knowledge base dedicated to Spore
- Sentience redirects here, due to the confusion between the terms sentience and sapience. Almost all creatures on Spore are assumed to be sentient.
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[edit] Definitions and Distinctions
[edit] Sapience:
Sapience is the ability of an organism or entity to act with judgement or intelligence. [1] Sapience is synonymous with some usages of the term sentient, though the two are not exactly equal; sentience is the ability to sense or feel, while sapience is the ability to think about sensations, feelings and ideas.
Sapience is technically a higher function than sentience, though the common confusion between the two terms has historically been abused by various groups — most notably animal rights activists — to attempt to convince the public that sentient animals are equivalent to sapient humans. This has led to the belief that sapience and sentience have the same meaning. The technical distinction between the two concepts is important, however.
[edit] Sentience:
Sentience is the capacity for basic consciousness — the ability to feel or perceive, not necessarily including the faculty of self-awareness. [2] The word sentient is often confused with the word sapient, which can connotate knowledge, higher consciousness, or apperception. The root of the confusion is that the word conscious has a number of different meanings in English. (It's easier to distinguish the two by looking at their Latin roots: sentire, "to feel"; and sapere, "to know".)
[edit] In-Game
The advent of sapience in Spore marks the reaching of the tribal phase, achieved by upgrading a creature's intelligence until it reaches a critical level in the creature editor.
Once sapient, creatures show an increase in the number of verbs available to them, linked to objects that can be purchased via the game's shopping catalogue — such as buildings and weapons — in the game world.
