You are mixing up terms. All animals are sentient. Not all animals are intelligent. Only very few animals appear to be sapient. Octopuses are certainly one of the few animals that appear to be beyond a reasonable doubt.
Intelligence is the ability to acquire and apply knowledge- reasoning, problem solving, etc. This is readily observed in many experiments with octopuses.
Yes, I always have had a problem with that. They use it incorrectly, and most don't even consider the idea of a sense of self as relevant, only the ability to suffer, although the latter is only relevant in the context of the former IMO.
> Intelligence is the ability to acquire and apply knowledge- reasoning, problem solving, etc. This is readily observed in many experiments with octopuses.
Intelligence can be a property of 'dumb' systems though, e.g. slime mold and plants.
Octopuses don't just exhibit intelligence, but rather metacognition. They can think about themselves in relation to their environment and manipulate their environment to suit their needs, willfully and deliberately, and not in any replanned way.
They also are capable of mental time travel, the ability to beware of and plan for the future, not in an instinctual way such gathering nuts but on a short term basis in reaction to their environment and stimuli.
There are very few animals who exhibit these traits, and these traits are generally a strong indicator of self-awareness and intelligence to the level of at least a toddler.
I mean, for the standard definition of sapience it is.
> many consider passing the turning test, or an even stronger form thereof to be required for sapience
Those many are wrong. There is nothing in the definition of sapience that would tie to to something as specific to humans as the Turing test.
Yes, but it's a test for humans to interpret and judge. What kind of nonsense is it to think it should be used for an animal? A possibly sentient computer is going to be programmed to communicate in one of the human languages for obvious reasons, and animals don't have that luxury. I can't see why you would think a Turing test would be relevant to a discussion of animal sapience at all.
> What on earth is your "standard" definition of sapience?
Whatever Merriam-Webster or Oxford give.
Hilariously, this is the result I get from Merriam-Webster: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sapience did you even look?
No, it isn't. The word may stem from using humanity as a baseline, but it isn't limtied to humans at all.
> Hilariously, this is the result I get from Merriam-Webster: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sapience did you even look?
Yes, in the past. It's perfectly relevant. The definition redirects to wisdom and sagacity. I'm going to quote from the wiki entry[] on wisdom to demonstrate why the definition is precisely apt.
> Wisdom, sapience, or sagacity is the ability to contemplate and act productively using knowledge, experience, understanding, common sense, and insight.
These are generally the traits we find correlated to animals that we consider to be sapient, self-aware and capable of metacognition, e.g. elephants, chimps, crows, parrots, etc.