To be clear, this is regarding sentience, not sapience.
which of the two is more significant and why?
Neither is more significant. I was pointing out that the study was regarding body-awareness and basic emotional response in the animals, not trying to demonstrate, for example, that octopuses are as intelligent as a (insert age) human child. It's about squids noticing when you hurt them, not octopuses appreciating music.
* https://sfdictionary.com/view/298/sophont
If anyone wants an excellent dictionary of sci-fi / fantasy terms, look at the (free, online) Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction by Jesse Sheidlower, a lexicographer who has had a career with the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and others. It started as an OED project to record sci-fi words and IIRC still has access to their internal databases.
They have other interesting features, like a list of words coined by author:
* https://sfdictionary.com/most_first_cites_authors
And they want help, if anyone on HN happens to be familiar with sci-fi or related literature: "It is hoped that the site will grow to include subfields or related areas, such as gaming, comics, or anime/manga."
Dogs are more than sentient. Part of their behavior is learned, they have knowledge, experience, understanding, common sense (with both dogs and humans). No idea if insight has been studied in dogs specifically, but it isn't a human exclusive either (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23231629/).
Which, I mean, they are. Here's a litmus test: Is that creature so simple that you (or a suitably skilled technologist) could build one? If so then it's not sentient/sapient/a person/something we shouldn't be mean to. If not then maybe we should pay it a little more respect.
Sapience was probably defined hoping to make it a human exclusive, but recent science has eroded the idea of a qualitative singularity in humans. We are merely quantitatively different.
Even single cells can be conditioned using the Pavlovian paradigm, which is a basic form of learning.
I'd expect an entity with complex and immutable information processing ability (no writable memory) to be purely sentient.
You're bang on the money with sapience being originally intended to be a merit badge for being human.
I'm guessing your last line was just riffing on functional purity but if not, my definition of sentience (which is a superset of consciousness) includes perception of current and past self-states which means (by my definitions, at least) an immutable construct isn't sentient by itself. I guess if you always pass in a self-state-vector then the system of (construct, self-state) could be conscious?
It's especially ironic because the very dogs in question were engineered by humans over vast generations, with a genetic engineering technique called selective breeding.
Dogs aren't just built, they're designed.