Worldbuilding 205: Sentients, Sapients, and Sophonts
Greetings and Salinometer! You know what, it is kind of salty in here, ANNE! Did you spill the salt again!? Anyway, hi and welcome to the first post of 2026! So long and so fast… Anyway, today we will be discussing a very important concept to worldbuilding as 99% of all worlds always include it, and a story isn’t a story without them. Sophonts.
Definition
How do we start the new year in any other way than giving a definition? Of course we cannot start it any other way!
A sophont is any entity that possesses sophonce.
Though what is sophonce?
Sophonce is the collection of cognitive capabilities that humans possess or more.
Is one way to look at it, at least, and it is quite popular and easy to digest, but I will go for another
Sophonce is the cognitive ability to think about one’s own thinking.
Which, in my view, encompasses all human cognitive capabilities, but I will go into more about it in the next section
Sophonce vs Sapience vs Sentience
What the F is with all these words? Well, dear reader, I am here to explain!
Sentience
We’ll start with the one that is the most common in the animal kingdom, sentience. Sentience is essentially the ability to understand one's own existence. A sentient being can experience the world and understand that they are separate and distinct from the world.
Even a lot of “lower” animals are sentient. For example, common house pets that we all love, cats and dogs, are sentient. They know they are distinct and you are a different being; they can feel pain, joy, and happiness (mostly because you are a good pet owner who loves them very much!), so they are sentient and have sentience.
Sentient beings have an internal model of the world inside their mind. An example of sentience is just the act of feeling pain because pain requires an experience and a concept of self. A counterexample is a lot of insects, as they don’t think; they act on stimuli without much thought. Some arachnids, though, do seem to be quite sentient.
Sapience
A being that can think and reason about the world is said to be sapient. All beings that are sentient have an internal model of the world and how it works. That is why they do anything. Their model says that if they do X, they can expect Y to happen. This is universal to all sentient beings, and they can even modify it through experiences of the world.
But the key component is that their model, generally speaking, is only about what they have experienced. If they have not experienced something, their internal model cannot account for it and draw any conclusions about it.
This is where sapience comes into the picture. A sapient being can, through their pre-existing experiences, reason and deduce to fill the gaps that their internal model of the world has. Based on experiences X, Y, and Z, they reason that if Q happens, that they have never had happen to them, then W should follow.
One often says also that a sapient being can solve novel problems, use abstract thought and logic, and plan around cause and effect. Though I think my definition before covers that, and is about how the mind works and its model.
Many animals have this, but not all. Other apes have this, elephants and dolphins have this, and I think crows and ravens can be said to have this to varying degrees.
An example of this is that Jane the Bobcat has been through a lot in her life. She has walked into lamp posts and once she even ran into a wall, and a few times in her life she’s fallen over because her tiny legs did not cooperate. So she stands at the cliff edge and looks over. From those 3 experiences, she concludes a few things: if she goes off, she’ll fall based on her leg failures, as that is what happens when nothing is supporting her. And having seen things fall off trees, she also knows the longer it falls, the faster it gets. And based on her experiences with the amount of pain increasing the faster she went into the wall, she concludes that if she falls, she will hit the ground really fast, and it will hurt really bad, and probably to the point that it will kill her.
Sophonce
Despite all that… it feels like there is more to a human, doesn’t it? Well, that is where sophonce comes in. A sapient being can reason to update their internal model of the world, and a sophont can think and reason to update their reasoning about their internal model of the world.
The way to think about it is this: a sapient being can think and reason and then update their model. But if their reasoning is incomplete for any reason because their method of reasoning is flawed, they are generally not able to correct it. They are stuck drawing the wrong conclusion all the time from the same data set.
A sophont, on the other hand, can change the way they think and reason, so despite having the same original input, they can reach different conclusions and hone their reasoning capabilities.
Let’s tell a little story to make it clearer. We’ll take Jane the Bobcat again; she’s a smart cookie. And George the elephant. They have had similar lives despite being of wildly different species. They had experiences, drew conclusions that saved their lives in situations that they had never experienced before. Such as that animals of a specific sort tend to like to hide in bushes, and when Jane and George saw a new animal of the same sort, they concluded it would hide in bushes too and stayed away from the bushes. It saved their hides many times.
But they have also had quite a few duds; some conclusions turned out to be wrong. Jane shrugged it off, none the wiser, and continued on. What does a mistake mean when it didn’t harm her? George was different, though. When these things happened, he sat down on his gargantuan elephant butt and thought about why it was wrong. Even the ones that did no harm to him, why were these conclusions wrong?
He went through what he knew, what he might have missed, what errors his earlier thinking could have made, and tried to think how his thinking could get better. Then the next time Jane and George face a similar event, Jane draws the wrong conclusion yet again and gains nothing because she never saw a problem with her reasoning. She cannot see that her reasoning could ever be the problem. George, on the other hand, has adjusted how he thinks, and with it, he draws the correct conclusion and gets the bananas out of this event. He is now trying to figure out why he wanted the bananas to begin with, because elephants don’t eat bananas, but that is not for this tale to tell.
Some might say it has to do with morals and thinking about morals and the like, but I would argue that the ability to reason and think about reasoning and thinking necessarily includes morals too, because it is meta-cognition in all cases, and that is what sophonce ultimately is. The ability for meta-cognition, which is where humans shine… some of the time.
Does this matter?
Some might consider this pedantic, but yes, it actually does matter as the cognitive capacity of beings is of utmost importance to us humans. An example of this is how people generally view the suffering of beings. Generally, people don’t consider non-sentient beings capable of suffering, so things happening to them are a non-issue. That is one of the arguments for boiling lobsters alive, for example.
But paradoxically, with humans, if the being is full-on sophont, then suffering is more fine again. But there is that sentient to sapient range where people generally find that a being suffering intolerable and unacceptable because it feels to us that they are unable to understand and comprehend why it is happening, and thus it is worse for them. Sentient beings can suffer, but they don’t understand why, necessarily.
But a sophont? We are capable of suffering and understanding the suffering, why it happens, and how to take active measures to reduce the suffering. Either by reconstructing the environment or all around to minimise suffering or find some gas or liquid that makes the pain go away.
Other times, we actively seek out pain and suffering in order to get something on the other side that we find far more valuable. A “lowly” only sentient being doesn’t do that generally. An example is my laser treatments, it hurts like balls and is among the worst I’ve had, but I am going to it.
And why all of that matters is because when we build worlds, we do it for stories. And for stories aimed at anything but children, suffering is par for the course in any tale. A tale where no pain is happening is generally one without conflict, and no conflict means no fun. And I mean pain in the broadest possible sense and not just physical pain. So a non-sophont being enduring that kind of suffering in a tale would be REALLY uncomfortable for any consumer of media. I know my beloved sister would find it revolting.
This is one of many reasons why we sophonize objects and non-sophont beings, so their suffering becomes slightly more palatable to us. Another reason is that humans are sophonts, and we struggle to understand beings that are not sophonts, so to make them sophonts is to make them more relatable to us.
That is why non-sophonts, either sentient or sapient, are usually background characters, and their suffering is minimal or serves some extremely important narrative purpose.
Evolution of sophonce
When it comes to the brain, one thing is important to remember. It is expensive. Not necessarily in terms of the total amount of energy used, but per gram of it that exists, it consumes an enormous amount of energy. And the more versatile it is, the more expensive it naturally gets. It is like with computer chips; the more you want it to do, the more energy it is going to consume because the architecture gets bigger, and the infrastructure required takes more energy as well. As an example, the human brain takes up only about 2% of the body’s weight, but uses almost 20% of all its energy. That is a lot of energy!
So in the grand scheme of evolution, there is a heavy selective pressure against any development that increases the brain's complexity and size, as that is an enormous energy consumer. So what selective pressures encourage actual evolution of the brain? Well, for sentience, the price is very cheap relative to what you get. The brain becomes much more capable of interpreting the world and making predictions of it, while the energy cost doesn’t shoot off too high. That is why almost all, if not all, vertebrates are sentient, and a lot of non-vertebrates are sentient. Even arthropods–insects, spiders, etc.–have sentient members, if fewer of them.
Sapience, on the other hand, is much more expensive because the update to the brain, either by sheer size or quality, is much greater in order to reason about what has never happened. You can see the fall off in the number of species that can be considered viable here. We have, like, octopi as the only non-vertebrates as potentially here, and then some birds and about two handfuls of mammals. That is not a lot of species. It is that expensive. But what gives us this, then? Being able to do this level of reasoning does give quite a few advantages. One thing we see in a lot of these species is that either they are social or they use tools, or both. Neither of which is sufficient for sapience.
So often it comes with lifestyles that require more usage of the world around them over longer stretches of time. Here, longer stretches of time can just be a 30-minute project that you need to figure out. Let’s face it, most lifeforms on earth are not good at anything long-term, and that includes humans… But when you can do a 30-minute project to get something, that still leaves 95% of all other species excluded from it.
Sophonce, on the other hand, to the degree that humans are capable, there is only one known species. Humans. And to draw conclusions from a sample set of one is… dubious at the best of times, but we can hypothesize. What seems to have driven the humans to go from sapient to sophont is an increase in social cooperation and interactions. Which, if we look back at my discussion, what sophonce is makes sense. When you have a rather large group of people, the internal model of the world has to be quite adaptable, and while a sapient internal model is quite flexible, it has to be even more adaptable to the almost 100 members you know and deal with on a daily basis.
We get into the part many say then about moral considerations and such, as humans have to consider what another person thinks and what that one will think if you do this, and so on. When you get this deep, meta-cognition becomes necessary to function.
Continuum, not discrete
A small thing to remember is that this cognitive scale is a continuum, not something discrete. It is not like everything is cleanly either non-sentient, sentient only, sapient only, or sophont. And that is that. It is a fuzzy scale of cognitive capabilities, and we can see it in human development. When the child comes out of the birthing person screaming on top of its fresh new lungs, that thing is not sophonce-capable. Honestly, it is at most just sentient. Then, as a child, it is more toward being sapient, and in teenage/adulthood, it becomes a true sophont in terms of cognitive capabilities.
But at no step was there a sudden switch that turned on/off to change the human being's abilities; it was a gradual process of changing in the brain. That sophont ability existed from the beginning in the hardware of the human brain, but it takes time to develop anyway.
Summa summarum
So all in all, a sophont is someone that has meta-cognitive capabilities; it can be a human, alien, fantasy creature, inanimate objects, A.I.s, anything. As long as they have at least the human capacity to think about our own thinking, and all the key properties that come with it, they are a sophont.
Of course, humans are capable of much more than that, but I would say in the end, the thing that seems to differentiate humans the most from other species is the high level of meta-cognition, which is then used together with tools, social interactions, and language to do everything that humans have achieved. And a one-sentence explanation of each:
Sentience - The ability to have an internal model of the world and modify it based on experiences.
Sapience - The ability to extend the internal model to non-experienced cases using reasoning.
Sophonce - The ability to refine the internal model further by refining the reasoning method used to extend the model.
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Copyright ©️ 2026 Vivian Sayan. Original ideas belong to the respective authors. Generic concepts such as Sophonce, Sapience, and Sentience are copyrighted under Creative Commons with attribution, and any derivatives must also be Creative Commons. However, all language or exact phrasing is individually copyrighted by the respective authors. Contact them for information on usage and questions if uncertain what falls under Creative Commons. We’re almost always happy to give permission. Please contact the authors through this website’s contact page.
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