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[Kabooooom]

You misunderstand. I'm not saying our cognitive architecture is a fluke, using "our" in the sense of human. I mean, the evolutionary development of life on Earth and the selective pressures which led to intelligent life as we understand it developing the way it did. We can - according to the rules following which human life developed in our ecosystem - come up with theories about how similar life might develop in an ecosystem operating under similar rules. But my position is that the assumption about "similar rules" and "similar ecosystems" is an unsubstantiated leap. The reasons for us to assume a uniformity of rules with physics doesn't and chemistry doesn't extend to biology and evolution, because the latter two are just statistical processes, and depend a great deal on starting conditions and the subsequent interactions between elements.

The rules of biology are entirely dependent on those governing chemistry and physics. There is an entire field of biomechanics devoted to how the laws of physics influence biology. And indeed, ignoring all of that and purely examining it from an evolutionary standpoint, predictions can be made solely on statistics alone. For example, regardless of how an organisms nervous system is constructed, it is of evolutionary benefit to organize sensory and processing structures first into ganglia, and subsequently into a centralized brain. Evolution went this route precisely because the laws of physics govern the processing of information, and precisely because such an organization makes processing more efficient. Why should this be different on any world?

That aside, I have quite divergent views on how sapience is defined - largely because I think our "surprising" conclusion that a multitude of species are sapient is just a consequence of our general arrogance as a species, which ironically leads us to undervalue those things that do make us distinct and unique as a species, i.e., the peculiar and distinct interaction of our cognitive architecture leading to the kind of higher functions we exhibit and experience.

Most of the "higher functions" have been observed in other species countless times. Our cognitive difference is not a fundamental one, but rather one of gradation and degree. This is why the definition for sapience that you provide has been observed by scientists in my field to be scientifically useless. Everything we attribute as unique to human consciousness, has been observed to some degree in other species. So instead, a hard-line definition of sapience involving subjective self-awareness is most useful...and not just for science, but also for social arguments involving animal welfare and rights.

This is because unlike those other cognitive faculties, reflexive self-awareness is (for the most part), all or none. Sure, my analysis of myself "I am kabooom, I am a comparative neurologist, I am not particularly fond of the way my hair looks and I hate wearing fancy clothes" is a bit more developed than a Chimpanzee's abstract, non-linguistic thought process of "wtf is this white dot on my head, I'm going to use a mirror to examine it". But fundamentally, it is the same.

The view that most life is not sentient - most complex life, with partly recognizable neurological architecture - was never a persuasive idea to me. It was never persuasive because it was, among other things, predicated on the idea that there was just this special type of assortment of neurons that - like a switch - would take something that was the equivalent of a robot and turn into a subjectively aware. It's just the "right stuff" hypothesis for brains again from machine learning, and that view is stupid (it's the idea that a machine can't be self-aware because only brains can be self-aware).

I agree, this is an absurd view and not one that I adhere to. I bet you wont find a single comparative neurologist on earth that agrees with this. It's ludicrous, with the knowledge that we now have.

Personally, I believe most complex life IS sentient, including relatively primitive life or life with a centralized brain that is complex (but comparatively not so to vertebrates), such as insects. Sentience, defined as consciousness, clearly exists on a gradation and is not an "all-or-nothing" event. A perfect example of this from vertebrates is that for all species except for mammals, conscious vision is processed in the rostral (superior) colliculus, referred to as the "optic tectum" in fish, amphibians, reptiles, and birds - but this same structure in mammals processes unconscious, reflexive responses to visual stimuli...unless the visual cortex is severely damaged, and then a degree of low-level conscious processing occurs in the rostral colliculus, apparently unmasked by the defective cortex. This, and a hundred such examples illustrate why the view of absent sentience in animals with an underdeveloped telencephalon is ludicrous and not supported by modern neuroscience.

Beyond that, though, I think the technical distinction between sapience and sentience is dumb. It's dumb because it requires us to define into existence a subjective experience that's impossible for us to comprehend - subjective experience of qualia without self-awareness. I am of the view that the demarcation for sapience has to be a great deal more nuanced and complex, involving not just awareness but a kind of awareness based in language and expressiveness, with a distinctive capacity for, among other things, problem solving.

1) subjective experience of qualia without reflexive self awareness is not "impossible to comprehend", it is implied in the very definition of qualia.

Edit: Upon re-reading what you wrote, I think you may have misunderstood. I was making a specific distinction between reflexive self-awareness (ie: The intellectual understanding of the self - the "I am") and awareness of subjective experience (qualia), which yes, is 100% inseparable from awareness of a self. Lol, our language makes this difficult to describe scientifically. But indeed, it is not only possible, but most common in nature for a being to experience qualia without realizing intellectually that they exist. This is a critical distinction between sentience and sapience no matter what definition of sapience you choose - my perspective, and that of most of my colleagues, is that it is the ONLY distinction that is scientifically valuable.

2) hopefully I illustrated above why that definition isn't useful - and to underscore it, every species that exhibits self-awareness and many, many more exhibit advanced problem solving capacity, and some even advanced language capacity. Given how difficult these things are to judge compared to self-awareness, there is a practicality issue involved with a definition like yours too.

3) this is what I do for a living - I study the brains and minds of animals compared to humans. I have a feeling we dont disagree that much, but these definitions are scientifically important. Hard lines have to be drawn or reasonable conclusions can't be made.