Terms:
Sentience
Sentience is awareness, including the ability to experience pleasure or pain (or analogous drives and experiences) and make predictions about the future. A sentient being is sapient to at least some degree, and sentience is in turn a prerequisite for sophonce. On the other hand plants and single-celled organisms are considered non-sentient or minimally sentient.
Sentient
As an adjective, having the characteristics of sentience. As a noun, particularly as a collective noun, any being that is deemed to have sentience.
Sapience
Sapience is the ability to think and solve problems; intelligence in the strict sense.
Sapient
As an adjective, having the characteristics of sapience.
Metacognition
Metacognition is a beings self-awareness of it's own cognitive processes or anything related to them.
Self-awareness
Self-awareness is the explicit understanding that one exists. Furthermore, it includes the concept that one exists as an individual, separate from other people, with private thoughts. It may also include the understanding that other people are similarly self-aware.
Sophonce
Sophonce is sentience and sapience with metacognition: self-awareness, including self-reflection and the ability to think about one’s thinking.
Sophont
A person. A being that has the quality of sophonce. For historical reasons, sophont-grade ais, may be called “turingrade ais”, even though because of philosophical and practical difficulties with the Turing Test the term “sophont ai” would be clearer.
Daistallian Sophonce scale
D 1 = Inanimate
D 2 complex chemicals (enzymes)
D 3 self-replication (viruses & some prebiotic self-replicating chemicals)
D 4 reproduction & homeostasis (prokaryotic cells)
D 5 complex reproduction, symbiosis, sexes (single eukaryotic cells)
D 6 simple multicellular coordination (sponges, fungi)
D 7 complex multicellular coordination (plants)
D 8 elementary nervous system (jellyfish)
D 8 simple nervous system (insects, worms)
D 9 complex nervous system (chordates)
D 10 elementary sentience (fish, amphibians)
D 11 advanced sentience (reptiles)
D 12 elementary sapience (simple problem solving)
D 13 advanced sapience (complex problem solving, cephalopods, parrots)
D 14 metacognition (self-awareness of cognition, rats, some birds)
D 15 self awareness (bottlenose dolphins, apes, octopuses)
D 16 near sophonce (chimpanzees, bonobos)
D 17 elementary sophonce (Homo erectus)
D 18 simple sophonce (Homo sapiens)
D 19 advanced sophonce (transapients)
D 20 highly advanced sophonce (advanced transapients)
