Sapience is the ability of an organism or entity to act with intelligence. Sapience is synonymous with some usages of the term sentient, though the two are not exactly equal: sentience is the ability to sense or feel, while sapience is the ability to think about sensations, feelings and ideas. In usage, sentience and sapience both imply some form or state of consciousness, although consciousness is not strictly required in the case of sentience (as applied to plant life, which ordinarily react to the stimuli of warmth and ultraviolet radiation from the sun).
Sapience is derived from the Latin word, "sapere", which means to taste, perceive, and the present participle of which forms part of Homo sapiens, the biological classification created by Carolus Linnaeus to describe the human race.
An artificially intelligent agent could demonstrate sapience while not having any capacity to feel, while an animal might demonstrate it can feel (or react to) pain while not behaving with intelligence.
While precise definitions of sapience and sentience vary, it is agreed upon that most humans possess both. In science-fiction and animal rights (such as the Great Ape Project) the term 'person' is applied to any sapient being.
Present sapience is paradigmatically a sufficient condition of personhood, but to make it a necessary condition is unacceptable, since it forces us to deny personhood of the sleeping, the temporarily comatose, and those in infancy.
Like the Future Sapience account, the Continuum account entails that personhood ends with the permanent cessation of consciousness, since permanent unconsciousness is not bounded by R-related experience; it is not situated in memory as a discontinuity in the stream of experience, because no experience is subsequent to it.
The Future Sapience theory has to rely on a physical continuity theory of identity because, in the form in which I have described it, it claims that the pre-sapient prenate is (identical to) an individual who will be sapient.
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