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this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2026
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Are whales sentient? Apes? Dogs? Squid? Alligators? Spiders? Fleas? What's the test? (Yeah, the mirror test - how well do you think that really works?)
H. sapiens has more in common with fleas than LLMs - the LLMs only seem more familiar because they're trained on our text-based interactions. Whatever sentience LLMs do or do not develop, we will be debating how to define it probably until they start reproducing themselves and force us to a sit-down negotiation over how we will divide the Earth's resources - or maybe they won't bother with negotiation.
So, there’s a difference between sentience and sapience, being self aware, or having consciousness.
Sentient just means the ability to experience feelings.
Pretty much all the animals you mentioned are indeed sentient.
LLMs are not conscious or self aware. They don’t have the ability to feel, so they’re not sentient. There’s an argument that they’re reaching sapience or wisdom, which is the ability to apply experience and tacit knowledge to new situations and complex questions.
Which is the issue. They can become sapient before sentient, meaning they can apply experience to new situations without the ability to use feeling as part of that. That’s pretty much the science fiction AI nightmare. A cold, unemotional, unfeeling computer that can apply logic and experience to problems.
Yet another slippery fish to try to wrestle with bare hands. What constitutes complexity? Some relatively simple looking questions turn out to be highly complex: Are there any whole-number solutions to (a^n + b^n = c^n) if (n) is greater than 2?
Then, any number of complex looking questions turn out to be quite simple with a little insight: such as any large product which has a factor that reduces to 0.
What's simple for some people is hard for others, and I would posit that is greatly amplified when you stop comparing humans to humans and start comparing humans to animals or machines...
We put unfeeling psychopaths in charge of our largest corporations, to maximize profits - a machine might be less scary in the long run.