Talk:Wurm/@comment-25217644-20140906145242/@comment-50.141.109.24-20150210142306

Most people get sapient and sentient wrong. They use one when they mean the other or assume they are synonymous -- they're not. Humans and other fully intelligent races are sapient. In MGE, this includes almost all monster girls, gods, elves, dwarves, etc. a sapient creature is a thinking creature that has the ability to do a number of things non-sapients can't but the most important are language and the capacity for abstract thought. Sentience is the conscious awareness of self. Almost every sapient creature is also sentient, but most sentients are not sapient. All vertebrate mammals are sentient, for example. So are selected non-mammals. Most inverebrates are not. A sentient creature lives in the moment -- planning for the future and imagination both require abstract thought -- and while sentients may communicate with each other, it tends to be more in the form of attention getting sounds than defined words with attached meanings. In rare cases. You might have sapience without sentience -- an AI android for example might be intelligent but has no regard for or value of self. It's equipment and it knows it. Alternately, the body may be tele-operated and the sapience is stored elsewhere. A more medieval example of this is a lich -- the lich is sentient, but sapience is stored in the phylactery.