@laoat

Salience, sapience, and sentience carve cognition at its joints: • Salience is the capacity to select and focus on what’s happening (foreground vs background). • Sapience is the capacity to make sense of what’s happening (build a model, infer, predict, plan). • Sentience is the capacity to feel what’s happening as mattering (valence/urgency: good–bad, safe–danger, pain–relief). Together they form a loop: sentience provides felt value, which strongly drives salience (what grabs attention), while sapience organizes both into coherent understanding and action. That triad—selection, sense-making, felt valuation—is not a philosophical luxury; it’s an evolved control architecture for survival under limited time and energy. Across animal species, you see all three to varying degrees: they have attention systems, world-modelling behaviour, and affective/valence regulation (approach–avoid, stress/soothing, pain/pleasure).

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