alt Hacker NewsI was watching someone doing a really deep dive into speculative biology [0], and they finally got to the sentience/sapience/intelligence/sophont episode [1]. I'm not an expert in this area, but there was a discussion about obligative sapience and facultative sapience that i found fascinating.
Obligative sapience is only know to have evolved in humans. Obligative means we cannot survive without sapience. We must learn and use tools and whatever to live and continue evolution.
While facultative sapience seems to be a broadly used survival strategy across the animal kingdom - from crows to spiders to cuttlefish. Facultative sapients are able to survive without their learned behaviors, using them instead to augment their evolution.
Viewing these issues from the point of evolution and actually having a comparison, I feel, helps ground the discussion better.
Even more so from the very strange point of view of speculative biology. The creator of the 'Neotectons' gives a very strange viewpoint on the debate too, with good reasoning though not bulletproof by any means. As with any model, you can make it tapdance if you mess with the parameters enough. But I think that more efforts into speculative arenas would be helpful. Gedankenexperiments for sophonts and not just elevators and cosmology.