Intelligence- Mental capacity for advanced thought.

Sentience- Being aware of ones self. Also, looking up into the stars and wondering why you exist and wondering why you are where you are.

"Sentience- Being aware of ones self. Also, looking up into the stars and wondering why you exist and wondering why you are where you are."

Not necessarily. Being aware only means that you know you exist, you need intelligence to be able to look at the world around you and ask about it.

I second that motion.

Sentience requires some intelligence...

Do you mean sentience as in consciousness? As in... the sort of feeling we get that we are driving our bodies with our head as the cockpit? The sort of sensation that gives us the feeling that there must be a soul? Because if so, I'm inclined to believe that feeling is a side effect of cephalization. =)

yes

for example, a cat has intelligence. if there is a pizza on top of a high table, it would find a path to get to it. however, it would not question why it exists or why the pizza is there because it is not sentient.

Sentience does require intelligence. But sentience does not require sentience.

sorry, i meant to say,
Sentience does require intelligence. But intelligence does not require sentience

and i will revise and simplify this,
Sentience- being able to ask "why?"

Haha. Well it's impossible to say whether or not we have philosopher cats among us... The beautiful thing about consciousness is how personal it is. If I look at a cat from the outside it is just matter but when I look at the cat from the inside I see that it is as conscious as I am... just perhaps not as intelligent. =)

I think sentience is fairly common amongst relatively intelligent creatures, and not as unique to humans as we might like to think. The only reason I have to believe that other humans are sentient is because they look more like me and have the ability to convey their thoughts to me through speech and other forms of communication. Very little communication passes between a cat and I, and I'm not in a position to judge whether it asks "why?"

I just can't think of a reason why humans would be sentient, but say, a chimpanzee, dolphin, or squid wouldn't be. And if they are, then why not cats and dogs? Obviously there must be a limit, but I don't think intelligence and sentience are very separable.

Ah. I might be getting confused with sentience and consciousness now... there are just so many definitions. Sentience can be construed as being able to ask "why", consciousness can be construed as the feeling of being some presence in your body and not just the sum of your body parts, and both can be construed as simple self awareness... just being aware that you exist, that are not any other thing, and that you're aware that you're aware, in this recursive manner. I'm afraid each of my paragraphs might deal with a different definition... =/

Sentience. Apes and dolphins are pretty smart and crows even make tools, but they lack the reflective abilities of Man.

They have brains, but not minds.

My dogs are most definitely sentient. Fish and insects, not so, but I would argue that most mammals are sentient.

From Dictionary.com

1. having the power of perception by the senses; conscious.
2. characterized by sensation and consciousness.

By these definitions, my dogs and rabbits are sentient.

CATS!

Indeed. I would say most mammals, many birds, and some cephalopods are sentient then. If a small human child is sentient... which I certainly remember being, then I'm sure adult apes are.

well to answer the original question, using the traditional interpretation of sentience - meaning simply the ability to sense and perceive, then I would say that sentience is more important to evilution, than intelligence. I don't think spiders are intelligent, yet they sence a fly wiggling in their web, and they are able to take that sesory input, and perceive where the fly is so that they can eat it and thus survive to pass on their genes. Same thing with the fly that they are eating, it's able to somehow sense shit or rotting dead things, and perceive where it's located so that it can eat it and pass on it's genes (unless he gets caught in the aforementioned web first).

If you mean conciousness - as you said after the clarification, than clearly intelligence is more important, as very few animals (IMHO) have conciousness. Although I do think Apes, Whales, dolphins, and dogs among others, do.

But then again - what do you mean by intellegence? The ability to solve problems? The ability to know when danger is around, and therefore avoid it? Learning from past behavior? The answer to these questions would affect whether or not I thought different animals possessed intelligence. I've seen a rat learn how to dunk a basketball, by some measures of intelligence, that would count.

Well, I think the question is difficult to answer because consciousness is often treated as boolean, whereas intelligence is treated as a scaling quantity. Also, it's difficult to distinguish which traits are evolutionarily more important...