Most animals are sentient, like mammals and birds, the requirements for sentience are pretty low, just to be able to feel things really, which any bird or mammal can.
Sentience refers to the ability to feel, perceive, and have subjective experiences, including both positive and negative emotions like joy, pleasure, pain, and fear.
Hard to say. The most likely candidates would be other primates, especially chimpanzees and bonobos. We can see them using tools in the wild, which is pretty impressive as animals go.
We’re not the only intelligent life on earth. Dolphins and whales have complex social structures, traditions, even memes. Octopi and crows can figure out complex puzzles, and do it for fun even if there’s no physical incentive to do so. A young raven can recognize a human they’ve never met but who was especially nice or especially mean to their grandparent, which pretty much proves that they not only tell stories but can provide detailed verbal descriptions of an individual member of a completely different species. Every hallmark of neolithic human society, from stone tools to weaving to food preservation to fire, has been developed over and over by multiple species of animals.
I think the main truly unique thing humanity developed, is literacy. Lots of animals pass lessons from parent to child, or throughout a single tribe, but we’re the only ones on this planet who can record something we learn, leave it in storage, and have it read a hundred years later by somebody completely disconnected from our lives. Or put a message in a letter and send it to a completely different continent. That’s what let our technological development suddenly take off at an exponential rate, with every new scientist and inventor standing on the shoulders of giants instead of needing to start over from first principles.
Comments
Maybe. There may have already been, for all we know. Although we haven’t seen any proof of this.
Lots of people think dolphins and octopus are already there. I wonder if you mean would another species develop technology?
Most animals are sentient, like mammals and birds, the requirements for sentience are pretty low, just to be able to feel things really, which any bird or mammal can.
Sentience refers to the ability to feel, perceive, and have subjective experiences, including both positive and negative emotions like joy, pleasure, pain, and fear.
You mean sapient.
Hard to say. The most likely candidates would be other primates, especially chimpanzees and bonobos. We can see them using tools in the wild, which is pretty impressive as animals go.
We’re not the only intelligent life on earth. Dolphins and whales have complex social structures, traditions, even memes. Octopi and crows can figure out complex puzzles, and do it for fun even if there’s no physical incentive to do so. A young raven can recognize a human they’ve never met but who was especially nice or especially mean to their grandparent, which pretty much proves that they not only tell stories but can provide detailed verbal descriptions of an individual member of a completely different species. Every hallmark of neolithic human society, from stone tools to weaving to food preservation to fire, has been developed over and over by multiple species of animals.
I think the main truly unique thing humanity developed, is literacy. Lots of animals pass lessons from parent to child, or throughout a single tribe, but we’re the only ones on this planet who can record something we learn, leave it in storage, and have it read a hundred years later by somebody completely disconnected from our lives. Or put a message in a letter and send it to a completely different continent. That’s what let our technological development suddenly take off at an exponential rate, with every new scientist and inventor standing on the shoulders of giants instead of needing to start over from first principles.
Non-human animals are sentient.
I think the term you’re looking for is sapient. Sentient just means aware of yourself