I've been called insane, but haven't been proven a liar...

Just how sapient are those humans?

Humans are widely known as Homo Sapiens, which roughly means "Smart Human" - and so far, they're known as the only beings on Earth which possess intelligence. But there's that question, "if they're so smart, how the fuck does it come they're so stupid?" - which means, for truly sapient beings, way too many known humans just act so... unsapient.

Which kind of raises the question, just how sapient they are, and if they are actually sapient or not.

Criteria of sapience

We can reliably call a being sapient if he/she/it/??? satisfies the following criteria:

And now, let's see if humans satisfy these criteria...

The ability to think independently: Barely existent in most ordinary humans

In nearly every affair, humans rely on experts, authorities, guidelines, instructions, and all other kinds of "reputable sources" which basically outline most every detail of their affair. These sources are almost never second-guessed, challenged, or doubted by the ordinaries; they're used as some sort of the "ultimate truth sources" and their word is considered absolute. Even more, any attempt to second-guess these sources, prioritize one's own thinking over their judgement, or challenge them with one's own arguments is not just unusual for the ordinaries - it is outright frowned upon and discouraged by them, because it is assumed that an ordinary human is unfit for independent solution of complex issues, hence the trust in the authorities and experts of all sorts.

"Who do you think you are to doubt the experts?" and variations of this one are often heard when someone does actually challenge the "trusted source". When determining whether something is true or not, humans rely not on the facts and observations relevant to the issue, but instead on the "reputation" of the sources providing various talking points. In other words, it doesn't matter for them that there is midnight in California when there is already morning in Berlin, or that the ships sailing into the ocean seem to be "sinking" into the horizon whenever they're far enough from the viewer - the people believe that the Earth is round because the authority says so.

Of course, it isn't like there are none who operate facts, evidences, and arguments to determine the truth on their own. However, this is usually limited to professionals whose job is to actually try to study their surroundings (and more often than not, these are not ordinaries), or those very few who aren't certified scientists, but actually do have intelligence. (They're very rare so finding them is sure hard.)

Individual decision-making among ordinaries is yet to be seen, as even the mundane choices (such as choosing between an Android phone or an iPhone; preferring rap/pop/rock music; using the services/goods of one company and not the other; one's preferences, worldviews, religious/political beliefs in general) are thought to be at least heavily influenced by the peers and the community of ordinary humans, as well as corporate ads, propaganda, mass media, and sometimes even coercion. In nearly any situation requiring immediate attention, and a solution, these entities are known to panic/be nervous rather than to calm down and resolve their problems - and in many cases, while actually trying to resolve it, they're mostly trying to find a suitable standard solution to enact, instead of asserting the situation and creating a relevant solution from scratch/using the situation's unique circumstances.

Abstract thinking: Reliably not found in most humans

The ability for abstract thinking (meaning - thinking not reliant on any real-life examples) allows a person to evaluate and operate a concept without the need for addressing its real-life examples; that is, to operate its essence, not restricted by its exemplar manifestations. This allows for a broad, multi-point, unbiased conceptual analysis, and allows for relevant, precise judgement without relying on too much experimental/empirical data where it is unnecessary.

This one is used the most in creative thinking, as well as science and innovation, and basically any activity which requires one to be able to estimate and operate a situation without having to rely on its particular manifestations. However, it's usable pretty much everywhere,from solving simple problems to designing a brand-new masterpiece from both the technological and the artistic points of view - and if one thinks about it, this approach is more often than not superior to the example-based thinking, as it allows to evaluate the entity of topic in question directly, and therefore understand it directly - allowing more efficient operations.

There's one thing about it, though: it's considerably more cognitively-intensive than example-based thinking. To understand an entity or a phenomenon using only abstract thinking, one needs to evaluate enough of it to have a decent understanding of it. As opposed to this, the example-driven / strictly-concrete thinking solves the problem simply by offering a close-enough example, allowing the person-in-question to simplify the learning process by summoning an already-known entity/phenomenon description and slightly adjusting it for the new concept. Of course, such a method isn't precise enough and offers inferior understanding of the subject - but it's faster and often enough for whatever limited understanding humans need to have in order to work with it.

And then we see people explaining concepts such as pointers and variables as "numbered boxes of certain size" or "distinct vaults with their own keycodes"; operations related to generating/picking a random number being called "dice-rolling" or "coin-flipping"; and so on, and so on. Things not natively understood by most humans, as well as things humans struggle to understand, are being likened (for simplicity) to already-existent, familiar entities, so they would think of the said entity while trying to visualize the object-in-question.

The ability to solve problems independently: Rudimentary, if existent

Most ordinary humans haven't yet shown any significant ability to solve their problems, or set goals, completely independently from others - that wouldn't have been a sign of non-sapience if the humanity was a hive mind, but since it is a species made of completely autonomous individuals, the inability of most humans to solve/create tasks shows they're, most likely, not fully sapient.

Non-sapient animals, unlike sapients, are primarily driven by their instincts - so whether they're a hivemind or not, they don't need capabilities for individual goal creation/solution. Their instincts handle most, if not all, of their functionality. They set their goals and work towards solving them just fine. Sapient beings, however, in addition to their instincts, have various forms of higher cognition, which operates partially or fully on its own; nevertheless, it is capable of abstraction and independent goal creation/solution, as it is, in fact, a quite distinct apparatus existing at least partially outside the animal needs and animal essence.

The challenges a modern civilization presents, however, are nothing like the challenges nature presents; being the strongest, the fastest, or the nimblest no longer grants you guaranteed success as food is prevalently no longer gathered or hunted for, but primarily obtained via farming - and then traded for other goods with the society. So, one can be completely inept at both hunting or farming, and still live just alright. (Unless they live in Northern Canada, or eastern parts of Russia, where, due to the low energy boreal forests, large civilizations just can't be maintained and what settlements there are, they're too small to feed a completely inept person.) One can mention sports, and just how rich and famous athletes can get, but then again, let's not forget that they're practically useless for the civilization, save for providing some entertainment - in other words, a civilization can only support very few of these. The rest of bulky, musclebound persons go into lithium/coal mines or wherever there's a demand for raw physical power. Reportedly they get a decent pay, but the labor is literally back-breaking, exhausting, and, once again, not what animals do in nature. As a result, to become at least somewhat-successful, one needs to get away from those animal instincts, evaluate their personal notion of success, create a set of tasks and goals, and work towards their fulfillment. While the second one is something the animal instincts can do - they dictate to be able to buy lots of food/whores/amenities, or have the biggest house in the neighborhood, or the biggest influence/reputation in the neighborhood, or have the shiniest trinkets on them - the rest require at least some intelligent consideration.

And to resolve these issues, one expectedly seeks help from their peers, authorities, experts, spiritual leaders - whoever they trust. The less independent thinkers are out there, and the more people who seek for a life guidance - the more "standardized" life will seem to be, as there will be fewer options proposed by the independents, and the ordinary humans will just be picking one of the few options they have.

"You're wrong. The experts said so"

In most of their affairs, from something as simple as picking a suitable provider of good/services or finding desired software, to major life choices, humans are seen to be relying on each other fairly heavily. Humans are observed to be eager to both provide advice (often to the degree where they become aggressive pushers of their point) and receive one, which indicates a long-established relationship of mutually-assisted thinking in most affairs, among most known humans; and in some cases, individual problem resolution is considered to be an undesirable anomaly and is even shunned or ridiculed (as in more collectivist cultures such as Asian ones), reinforcing the notion that most humans aren't too good at thinking on their own.

Handling of complex concepts: Non-existent unless we consider one-link logical chains and addition/subtraction operations on two-digit numbers "complex"

This is a bit complicated one, but roughly speaking, a concept is a set/a multitude of sets of various representations of entities and occurences, as well as links between them.
These can be represented as graphs, logical schemes, set of statements linked by intermediate constructs, visual structures... whatever, basically.

It is hard to peer into another's mind, so exactly how complicated are their views, their reasoning, or the conceptual representation or both fictional and real-world concepts, is somewhat hard to say; the complexity of their thinking is inferred from their behavior, activities, beliefs and conversations. One way of approximating one's cognitive complexity involves analyzing a person's original content posted publicly, such as their own memes, videos, articles/blogs, comments, remarks etc., one can estimate one's cognitive complexity by analyzing the amount - and "quality" - of individual objects/entities/occurences, as well as conceptual links between them. By dividing one's activity into different time-frames and measuring one's content quality, one can make approximations about the person-in-question's current mental capabilities and how they seemingly change over time; since wild changes in one's mental capacity over time are unexpected without any solid reason, one can roughly assume the lower limit of a person's potential mental capabilities (meaning - their general intelligence) based on their most complicated output so far, and measure their active mental capacity (or how lazily/actively they use their cognition in general) by measuring the quality of their "normal" activity.

Roughly speaking, if a person mostly re-posts others' memes and rarely produces any output containing references to more than four entities, barring insults/demagogy/emotional expressions, it doesn't mean they're stupid long as there is some evidence of complicated thinking (a long, original article written some time back, or the ability to produce a fairly long, detailed, and coherent reply when motivated). If, however, the person-in-question mostly posts memes containing one or two sentences worth of words, doesn't display much creativity in conversations, and when they ever produce any long post/comment, it's full of insults/threats/emotional garbage - that means that the person in question is, most likely, incapable of complex thinking.

Discussing complicated topics with persons for long enough helps understand their active cognitive complexity. Less complicated individuals are prone to simplifying their representation of complicated entities; for example, to explain the superiority of civilized co-existence over barbarism and constant tribal wars, they use the concepts of "morality" and, sometimes, "natural rights" or something - instead of saying something like this:

"There are many options for relationships between various individuals and groups; it can be warfare, or peace and diplomacy, or something else, it all depends on many factors. As individuals who're interested in long-term prosperity - for which, a reliable amount of security is needed to be able to preserve and accumulate one's wealth - and while this can be achieved by becoming a menacing enough warrior, or dominating large enough populations, there's still constant risk of subversion, sabotage, and assassination - both by those who just want peace, and by competing factions. Peaceful coexistence, on the other hand, is based on the consent of the participants to not initiate aggression against fellow treaty members; this way, we can both reduce the levels of violence in our society greatly, improving our security and prosperity, and save us the time and resources which would've normally been used for combat - and the resources which would've lost during combat. Naturally, a society which adopts peaceful coexistence wins over warring factions - long as it has enough readiness to fight any emergent violent groups trying to conquer or destabilze the society."

Probably it's the first time you see something like this. Probably not (but I haven't someone using a quote that looks like this yet).

Either way, this one looks a lot more complicated (and relevant, if we analyze the narrative and the logical connections between the expressed entities) than some mystery "natural rights" which just exist because, and neither their origin nor their essence is explained. Or some "morality" which is literally pulled out of someone's ass and changes dynamically based on the whims of whoever's considered to be the current "expert" or "spiritual leader".

But in this, and in many other cases, ordinary people tend to gravitate not towards the most correct or the most accurate, but the simplest answer. From a sapient being's point, this isn't a feasible strategy, as the simplest point is simply not necessarily the most accurate, or correct, but this isn't the same with non-sapients, who prefer the shortest and simplest out of all competing notions. Because.

And where the complexity of a topic is just "too big" for the normies, they just outright put the topic aside in most known cases - often even surrendering to their fate if the topic is some serious threat which can, potentially at least, bring some harm to them. A good example for that behavior is normies refusing to resolve a social/political issue which brings them considreable discomfort, just because coming up with a solution is a pain. Another example is normies silently accepting the notion of God's will, because challenging the concept and trying to figure out whether God exists (and if He does, whether he will punish them for jerking off at the picture of fat, juicy titties on screen) is far more complicated than just looking it up in Google or finding a simple, binary yes-or-no answer using no less than one thinking cycle.

Once again, this is nonsense for a sapient being, since finding the most appropriate answer is the goal of inquiry - and it just so happens that there's no reason in looking for the simplest one.

The ability to link concepts together and disassemble them into many individual sub-concepts is another thing a sapient can do (unlike most humans). One of the best ways to show humans' lack of such abilities is the efficiency of mainstream propaganda, and the ease of duping those humans on a daily basis - both rely on the fact that humans, while reading or listening to something, usually do not think of anything else during the time, allowing to present them an intentionally limited vision with low risk of inducing doubt or any criticism.

"We're only collecting these wide swaths of information, which are enough to learn more about you than you yourself know, to improve our products and services."

- Nearly any enterprise tracking their users and collecting tons of data from them

"Yeah, we kinda trust you. Why would a corporation, which wastes millions of $$$ and lots of time just to invent new ways of tracking users, as well as working hard to prevent anonymous connections, actually track us? They're only doing this for some benevolent goal, after all."

- Stupid ordinaries

There's the concept of an evil entity tracking you so they would use that information later against you. There's the concept of someone actually employing wide-scale tracking. Not too hard to link these two together for a sapient.

The inability of humans to adequately link concepts and process them in tandem leads to numerous possibilities for those who want to manipulate or elsehow utilize them - and they rarely squander these. Creating restrictive religions which force them into an ascetic life yet dictate them to work hard, convincing people to accept the state's complete dominion over their lives (what could go wrong? It's all for safety, myah), tricking them into releasing all of their private lives' details into social media (who cares about consequences? They do want to show off and brag), manipulating them into starting massive witch hunts and turning on each other (who cares if we're being duped, THE INSERT_BAD_GUYS_NAME ARE BAD ENOUGH FOR US TO JUSTIFY LABELING POTENTIAL INNOCENTS AS BAD GUYS AND KILLING THEM OUTRIGHT. RAAAAAH!!!) and ultimately, tricking them into installing a brain-computer interface in their heads and injecting a very-poorly-advertised and absolutely suspicious mRNA cocktail in their bodies. The "software of life", as they advertise it - it looks very promising to those who can't link two things together and assume that there's one special type of software, called malware, and it only exists to do bad things. And the third concept is: "Humans can lie and selectively represent things". Together, these concepts give birth to reasonable suspicion - in sapients. Non-sapients, however, do not think like that as they do not link concepts together on their own - and the smart human-handlers sure do avoid mentioning these small details.

Handling uncertainties, determining truthiness/falsehood: Humans haven't shown any capability to operate uncertainties/weighted options, and their ability to identify truth/lie is mostly limited to what they can directly see or hear

In nearly any situation, there's more than one possible answer to any question - simply because the situation might be not fully known, or its representation might be faulty. The science have been proving itself wrong since probably its dawn, as various theories, constructed using a given set of knowledge, were later challenged or outright disproved using some new evidence or reasoning.

Nearly every statement can be reasonably doubted or challenged, so a simple true/false estimate is more often inadequate than it is useful. A sapient being is expected to understand that at least to some degree; as they wonder and search answers for various questions, they encounter more and more new data, which shall change some of the aspects of their worldview - leading to the understanding of uncertainty, and, consequently, the need to handle it somehow (for example, assembling a set of possible answers to an inquiry/a theory/hypothesis and assigning each of them a weight or probability).

For example, it is not known whether God (and other supernatural unexplainable) exists or not; there are various phenomena which can potentially be explained by a combination of already-known things, or via something-yet-unknown which may be discovered in future, or can't be explained by humans at all. Some things previously thought to be supernatural (such as certain weather events, like powerful storms or thunder) are now being explained with something "normal" such as atmospheric pressure fluctuations and electro-static charges; other things (various visions, encounters etc.) are being written off as "hallucinations" or "mental illnesses", yet have a good potential to be a manifesaton of something else; nearly every phenomenon has an infinite amount of possible interpretations, and which one of them is "best", is a question of perspective and associated goals.

And as nearly everything is uncertain, one should be ready to deal with the uncertainties; however, handling them requires a great deal of mental processing - deciding which option is more relevant and which is not, in which order to prioritize statements, and what to believe in according to different situations, requires a fair amount of thinking, which non-sapients just can't do. And so, they search for a simple "true" or "false" conclusion, which would then guide their actions and reasoning without the need to doubt, check and re-check their viewpoints, or look for any new knowledge, incorporate it with what is known and alter one's views based on that addition.

Of course, such an approach isn't at all effective for defining the actual truth; at best, it allows a fair degree of success, and a somewhat-reduced chance of a terrible loss, if we assume that the statements held "true" are more often true than they're not, and that the existing understanding of the state of affairs is close enough for a non-sapient being to not fuck themselves up too bad while acting out of their simplistic worldviews. With a good guide from outside, who will actually produce a fairly accurate representation of what's true/good/fair and what's false/evil/unfair, non-sapients can actually live their lives in decent conditions - that is, until whoever's handling them makes a terrible mistake and all goes down the drain.

Where the non-sapients mostly seek for a new guide to tell them what is true or false.

The ability to form their own personality without external guidance: Potentially exists in humans, in limited qualities, though its existence is dubious

The ability to form one's own "self" without external intervention is one of the essential trait of sapient beings - as sapients think a lot and think often, it's only expected from them to use their own knowledge to form their own worldviews according to their own beliefs. As they're expected to know themselves and their own needs better than anyone, they will surely prioritize their own knowledge, beliefs, and convictions when building their own self, over any external moral/ethical guidance.

For non-sapient beings, however, the notion of one's own "self" is not even that important; as they primarily think with their instincts, the only real concerns for them are how to survive most efficiently, how to leave offspring, and how to be well-fed, healthy, and comfortable. Therefore, they're much more concerned with collecting considered-to-be-proven-good survival practices, passing them on, and conforming to their pack/tribe's norms - even if this gets in the way of one's mental development. Not like they actually care about that.

Their focus on survival is essentially what allows authoritarian/oppressive regimes and ideologies to exist for a long time: long as they can live "fine enough to not have any serious issues", they're more than just OK with a dictator forcing them to comply with some set of rules a sapient would find stifling, oppressive, humiliating, or outright a threat for their own self. As they don't even have a decent notion of "own self", being essentially animals with somewhat-advanced mental faculties as compared to the lower species, they naturally do not even need to have an ability to construct their own personality and beliefs on their own - and in fact, this ability would only get in the way of satisfying their instinctive urges.

There is, however, some evidence of humans frequently expressing something similar to what we know as "personality formation" - I say "something similar" because the process is more often "picking a tribe to hang out" than actual self-construction. Even many artists/musicians/content-creators often conform to their audience's needs and create their compositions based on things such as guidelines of the style they associate themselves with, and currently popular trends. For example, rap artists/performers often create an image of a "rich, authoritative and ferocious nigger with a load of chicks"; their "songs" often feature highly similar beats, the lyrics are read with roughly the same intonation and inclination across multiple artists, and the topics of their songs are often similar or even identical to each other - one could say it's mostly songs about gangsters, racism, loyalty towards whatever their own pack, and the hard life of a thug (lol). Sometimes it's bragging about chicks/gold/authority they have in their little shitty gang .

So even what we would perceive as the "expressions of their personalities" might be interpretted as mere tribal allegiance and copy-catting.

Independent learning: Existent, but fairly limited in humans

Come to think of it, a fair degree of independent learning exists even in non-sapient animals. They have to learn by themselves things like how to hunt/forage, seek shelter, detect dangers, distinguish between friend and foe, etc. Still, many skills and a lot of knowledge is typically beng imprinted into them - most often by their parents - and there is a certain degree of so-called "unconditional reflexes" and other instincts an animal is born with, which don't even require any training to reveal themselves.

So the question is not so much "Whether the humans do have that ability to learn on their own" but "How much difference between a human's ability to learn and an animal's ability is there".

Humans highly value things like ancestral knowledge/experience, and learning from adult in general; many cultures still have "respect towards elders just because they're elders". Before progressivism as an ideology became strong enough to influence their social trends, enough to priortize logic and reason, and not "knowledge of the past generations", as main decision-making mechanisms, the societies were incredibly conservative - to the point of outright stagnation - and there was almost no progress made in any fields. (One can say it's mostly thanks to the church's brutality and their constant burnings of bright persons, but just how many individuals in average per 10 years did they burn, or elsehow prosecute, for any discovery or theory that contradicts with whatever the church defined as the divine truth?)

Animals have that mechanism, known as "imprinting", it's basically learning from the adult members of the pride/species. After they mature, their primary mechanism of learning is "experience" - basically repeating the same thing over and expecting a different result applying minor changes to their tactics each time, which leads to cumulative learning. They execute the same schedule/set of actions over an over, each time receiving a sort-of "mistake report" from whatever they have as thinking, such as when they'd miss their prey or which wrong move alerted their target/rivals of ther presence nearby; this report is then used to further hone their behavior, resulting in so-called "accumulated wisdom". Humans, n their majority, basically learn the same way; they perform the same activity over and over until they get more experienced, and thus more capable of solving their tasks.

However, there's another way of learning: conceptual analysis. Instead of learning a set of actions from their adults, and their honing it via experience, a sapient being analyses their task closely, creating a set of potential solutions - and from them, building strategies for each. Through comparison of solutions and strategies, the best fitting one is chosen; a detailed action plan is created, and the sapient being then acts on that plan instead of blindly "gaining experience". This is quite unlike what most ordinary humans do - they just briefly oversee their task, looking for known patterns and associated learnt ways to handle it, and hope that whatever is not known will be insignificant; if the task on hand is too unfamiliar, they seek help from others and, if none found, just panic.

The more sapient a being is, the less they rely on experience - and the more on their analytic abilities, which allow solution of the problem at hand with the highest efficiency. This not only helps a sapient person to solve the problem most efficiently, but actually helps in invention, discovery and innovation, since a conceptual approach can lead to creation of new concepts, or creative usage of foreign techniques and exotic methods which can't be learned through experience, except by a lucky chance.

Creativity, fantasy and artistic inclinations: Reliably not found in most normies

It's not like we can just peer in people's minds to see if they're creative or just plain douches, but there is one criterion which we can use to guess their creativity: Expression of original, non-template thoughts.

Sure thing, individuals who're just brimming with ideas are creative. However, it's not like they necessarily output every single thing that came to their mind - so they could be silently creating lots and lots of stuff in their head and then just shelving it all away (for example, believing it's not perfect/considerably flawed/just a BS idea) for decades, revealing very few of their ideas to public. Additionally, since most creativity just doesn't sell well on the market, and there's no reason to say it should, there's little reason for many people to express themselves or their ideas - especially in the modern busyass world where they're urged to spend as much energy and time building their career and taking care of their business as possible, leaving comparatively little to attend their mental/spiritual needs. (Ironically, they were supposed to do their careers/businesses in order to gain enough resources and time to take care of their higher-order needs. The modern lifestyle is just the opposite.)

Of course, it's not that easy to just destroy one's intellect, so even if they live in such an oppressive regime, there are still ways their creativity might be expressed.

Every once in a while, during a conversation, or while chilling out with friends, or while commenting or posting something, basically whenever the atmosphere is more or less relaxed, the creativity will reveal itself. An interesting idea there. A catchy phrase here. A statement that kind-of nails it... or a full-blown inspiration to write a novel or something like that. Such individuals might even leave their former place of employment and create an enterprise of their own, and are generally more inclined towards being freelancers/self-employed/enterpreneurs due to the more free lifestyle. Even if they, for any reason, are being corporate indentured servants, during their service they're often found applying creative solutions to whatever tasks they have.

And given the tendency of humans to post much everything they did of at least moderate significance on the social media, it's not too hard to find any potential creative aspirations within them.

Which means, the fact that humans rarely show any creativity or fantasy, most likely proves they don't really have any.

Additionally, the aforementioned fact that their creations often resemble each other way too much can also contribute to the notion that humans in general do not have significant creative capabilities. Derivatives and parodies are one thing, but simply copy-pasting existing templates with little consideration can hardly be called "art". And something tells me those rapper niggers and horror movie directors aren't making a parody. Or doing anything significant on their own.

Additional reasons to think humans aren't sapient

Of course! Humans barely have any traits of actual sapient beings, they are proven to match animals more than sapient beings, but this... just... doesn't look right, okay? There has to be some way in which humans can prove they're sapient! Because... because... a reputable scientist once said they are.

Well then... there are other fields in which humanity fails miserably as a species!

Humans can't handle language too well

There are said to be two signal systems - simply called the "first signal system" (emotions, gestures, mimics, ...) and the "second signal system" (language, formulas, schemes...). These two serve as one of the key criteria in defining whether a species are sapient or not: if they can master the second signal system, then they are.

Humans can understand words and can speak, but the presence of the second signal system in human communications is mostly shallow. An average human's vocabulary is "slightly more than basic", which indicates a limited usage of language; they express themselves and communicate primarily through gestures, varying intonation, mimics, and possibly, even pheromones - the language is thought to have more of a supportive role than the primary means of communication. Even on the internet, where communication is digital, humans manage to express themselves through images (re-usable memes which are more often than not photoshopped pictures from movies, since actually drawing their own pictures is a fairly intensive mental task) and videos (fairly often it's a dude sitting in front of a camera and talking). Long texts and mathematical formulas, on the other hand, tend to invoke some sort of repulsion among most of them; there is an observed trend among educators to try to "simplify" their teaching (as if you can actually do this without losing a great deal of the concept) and the so-called "popular science" is basically a very, very narrowed-down and reduced info-bulletin containing more often than not a small portion of random scientific theories, expressed in a rather artistic or entertaining form.

When humans do use language, the narration often includes various grunts and other noises (it's not uncommon to hear a lot of "ugh"s and "ooh"s and "aah"s and such from an average human, sometimes these take up about as much as 12% of their speech - possibly even more). These noises do not have an associated meaning, and are considered to be part of the "first signal system" as well. In addition, they often outright struggle with expression of some ideas and concepts - which results in them starting to express more gestures/mimics/grunts, and saying something like, "well, that's just how things are/that's just how life is". Most of the time this happens when they attempt to explain some behavior, ideals, views, or practices they've inherited from the society from observatory learning they themselves do not know how does it work or why are they doing this. They do have an understanding of what they're doing, but since they're poor at or incapable of mental activities of higher order, attempts to explain that result in animal-like grunting, waving their extremities wildly, and saying shit like "that's just how it is".

(By the way, even their frustration could be properly explained with language, for example: "We do not know exactly why are we doing this, or how does it work. We don't know whether what we are doing is universally correct, or whether it is actually a good thing even from our ow perspective. When we've learned to do things this way, we didn't think - and when we grew up, we became so used to doing things this way, we never actually bothered re-thinking anything. That works for us and we so far do not see any need to strain our brains. ")

Roughly speaking, an average human's handling of language is similar to what thought to be the level of handling possessed by the average Homo erectus member. They're thought to use some sort of proto-language, which is thought to be pictographic and operate syllables rather than individual letters and precise sounds; with the advent of worldwide fast communications, and especially social media and instant messengers, the usage of actual pictograms (known as emoticons) grew enough to consider them part of human language. Asian nations have never actually invented a proper alphabet, their languages still operating numerous semi-pictograms expressed as syllables, words, or even entire phases and sentences.

Consider these part of modern alphabet. They're used hella often.

The mainstream human activities are primitive

What would you expect a sapient being to do in their free time?.. Lots of things. Yes, lots of things upon things to do, with no end to possible variations of activities. Not too unlike animals hone their abilities in their free time, chasing some butterfly (training reflexes) or playing with each other (stamina, strength, agility training through contests, in a fashion somewhat similar to generative-adversary networks training), sapient beings increase own mental capabilities in various ways - the most common of which are creativity, innovation, and solving various puzzles and riddles of all kinds.

Or they go hunting/fishing/watching movies/playing some videogames/basically doing their own. After all, sapience does not mean that the "beast constituent", which expectedly was in the representatives of that species through their evolutionary path, mysteriously disappears.

However, even in case of an activity enjoyed both by the sapients and non-sapients, it's possible to distinguish between the two because they do it in different ways. Generally, non-sapients prefer a more simple approach (and sometimes, a sort-of guiding hand which tells them what to do - that's why you see those tutorials and pop-up in-game instructions in videogames, for example) while sapients aren't against some sort of a riddle, or a mental challenge, or basically the need to figure stuff out by themselves. In many cases they're outright repulsive towards simplistic/primitive pastimes and entertainment - they don't like sports, drinking parties or games with primitive design/gameplay due to there being barely anything to do, instead preferring to hunt for peculiarities and easter-eggs in their favorite videogame, tinker with odd and unusual technologies, read interesting stories, create stuff, etc.

It's kind of popular and mainstream-y to dunk on companies making such primitive entertainment for masses, but despite receiving lots of flak, these companies' products are still popular. Very popular. EA might be among the worst companies in America, pop music performers might be just whores attracting customers with their bodies more than their songs, movies might have no soul these days and employ cheap, flashy tricks to attract audience, and basically the society might be "degenerate". But their products are selling. Who's buying?..

Most humans can only be reliably trained to be narrow-field specialists

Intelligence is a general ability, which allows handling of all cognitive tasks - be it calculations, creativity, handling sets of statements, managing rules/laws/morals/ideologies, compound tasks, or basically anything that requires mental involvement. In othe words, a sapient person can be a mathematical genius just as easy as they would write poems, create beautiful artworks, engineer technological marvels, have a decent knowledge of human anatomy, geography, astronomy, and basically learn and effectively manage whatever knowledge they want.

Actually, few, if any, great persons were known to be able to handle just one area of expertise - even when human civilization began shifting to strict labor specialization, and even talented persons found themselves assigned to a rather specific profession instead of handling several tasks simultaneously, the sapient ones were known to have either an unusually wide and deep knowledge of their subject, or knowledge of many areas, or both.

It's the reverse when we talk about normal humans. Even when their education programs involve a variety of subjects, they typically excel at precisely the area of their specialty. That's not to say they're completely unaware of things outside their profession, but come to think about it, they're much closer to that one than to broad, extensive knowledge of multiple areas. And even there, they mostly learn from experience, not written knowledge - which means, they just don't learn anything outside of their area. Not even the nature of their very society which they fucking live in.

And if lack of motivation to learn stuff outside their area of expertise can be explained by the fact that it isn't something that brings bread on the table (and allows to buy that table in the first place), nor it is something they're interested in, how come they aren't motivated to learn their own society, whose affairs directly impact the price of bread, tables, and basically anything they buy? As well as availability of that bread. Or their salary. Or whether they're going to be semi-free workers or small enterpreneurs, or they'll instead be slaves or peasants who'll instead be mostly at the mercy of their lord or master. In short, there's no tangible reason for them to not learn their own damn society - unless they just can't since it's a fairly complicated topic.

Teaching humans is also a fairly slow process, since they can only learn through experience - it takes quite some time to learn to handle all of the common and less-than-common yet important situations they'll deal with. Additionally, since the burdens of a modern civilization are fairly high due to its sheer complexity and the level of technologies used, they'll run into a situation where they'll be forced to learn complex concepts - which is not an issue for a sapient, since they actually create these concepts and manage them, but for normal humans it's a serious headache. As a result (and a further proof of human non-sapience), as civilization progresses and its complexity increases, it is forced to re-organize itself in order to allow increasingly more specific jobs (which reduces a worker's understanding of their role even further, leading to some partially funny-partially scary consequences).

Sentient, not sapient

There's, however, the concept of sentience, the ability to experience complex emotions.

While a sapient being is defined by their high general intelligence - high enough to be called a distinct feature, at the very least - sentience is the ability to experience a wide spectrum of complex emotions, beyond typical simple driving impulses - such as love/hate, sadness/joy, shame, pride, the sense of community/belonging, loneliness, depression, anxiety etc. While their intelligence is considerably lower than sapients' intelligence , their emotional spectrum can be considered roughly similar to that of currently known sapient... beings which are highly likely not human due to their vast difference in intelligence and behavior.

There's a lot greater variation of emotional spectrum in sapients than there is in normal humans - different sapient individuals have vastly different emotional profiles, while humans are more or less similar in that regard - but the types of emotions they feel are roughly the same.

This factor is possibly why the normal humans got lumped with sapients into a single species. That, and the fact that they all look quite similar, of course. Unless one is to thoroughly analyze their cognitive abilities - which requires at least a considerable deal of social and behavioral analysis, as well as directly poking them with various stimuli to see their reactions - they do freakin' look a lot like sapients, even to sapients. Around the time the Homo sapiens term was coined, human behavior wasn't studied as thoroughly as it is now, and the little behavioral quirks I've brought as the reasoning for division of the so-called "Homo sapiens" race into normal humans and sapient beings were simply overlooked. They look roughly like you, and they behave roughly like you? Consider them of the same species as you.

That is, until it becomes too evident that the differences between the two are too glaring to just ignore them.

Are they an intermediate species between the straight-standers and the sapients, or are sapients a completely different one?..

This one is kind-of an unresolved, yet curious question.

On one hand, the ordinary humans kinda look like an intermediate species of sorts: though they aren't sapient, they possess a rudimentary language, can use primitive tools fairly well, and even their emotional spectrum is highly similar to that of the sapient humanoid persons. Emotions are a simpler mechanism than intelligence, but are more advanced than simple instincts and impulsive drives common among higher animals - they can arguably be considered also a kind of higher cognitive activity, as they are not as linear and straightforward as simple animal reflexes and impulses.

On the other hand, however, humans' fundamental behavior greatly differs from that of most known sapients; unlike sapients, humans are impulsive and violent, unwilling to bother themselves with conversations much beyond issuing orders and listening to responses of acknowledgement. This is opposite to what sapients exhibit, preferring a more calm and calculated approach, and resolving their conflicts and problems through debates and negotiations; while not totally opposed to violence, they tend to treat it as a second, if not third-order means, the tool to use if all else fails, but the problem isn't going anywhere. Instead of valuing military prowess and social status, they tend to value merit and competence - possibly indicating that they haven't had much fighting during their evolution, in the first place.

Many things present in humans on a low enough level - behavioral traits which can be reasonably traced back to certain instincts and animal urges, such as a strife for domination, high-priority reproductive instinct, and a comparatively aggressive fight-or-flight stance, are not found in sapients, who instead prefer much complicated social relationships. What's more, sapients tend to show these attitudes since their very young age, which excludes social conditioning repressing these mechanisms - a very powerful argument to consider that they didn't even have these human urges, in the first place - which leads to the conclusion: sapients aren't human.

Additionally, bullying and other abuse of highly-intelligent persons is apparent enough to be acknowledged in popular culture - as well as disdain towards "nerds" from humans, and generally hostile attitude towards intelligent persons observed among humans. Of course, this can be explained with outright envy - dumb ass retards acknowledging their intellectual inferiority before their mental superiors and venting their frustration in the most primitive and the only available to them way. But another explanation, a more robust one, involves xenophobia, a common IFF mechanism present in animals - especially in hunters, from whom the humans have evolved. Animals with meat-heavy diets are expected to have it far rougher than herbivores eating grass: there are considerably less edible animals than there are fruits and herbs, which is almost sure to result in some heavy competition arising from scarcity of food. On the other hand, sometimes living in packs can be beneficial, as this allows for obtaining harder-to-kill prey, such as larger animals which can be overwhelmed by the sheer numbers, but are more than capable of killing an individual predator of the species. This gives birth to a highly tribal and xenophobic mindset, the purpose of which is to provide enhanced efficiency in the pack, but on the other hand, serves to keep away the undesirable intruders possibly trying to take away the pack's food.

And now, if we imagine that those smarter animals (who are, by the way, omnivores) did live somewhere near the hunter carnivores, and that their social organization was clearly superior, it isn't too hard to imagine that they would be a worthy competitor for the more aggressive humans. Or at least they would look like one. Animals are able to recognize behavioral patterns; it doesn't take too much for them to consider "those smart/slick beings which kinda look like us but just don't smell right" to be potential rivals. Especially if those smarter animals were the first to grab the stick and start whacking the aggressive pre-Homo habilis around in order to get rid of the aggressive fuckers.

If we really want to dive into the weird, there's a theory that humans actually come from another world entirely; possibly in an attempt to colonize a habitable world which was too hot/cold/had too thick or thin atmosphere/too light or too heavy/was otherwise inhospitable for whatever race that found the Earth, they've actually developed a species which would be decent enough to host their "souls", and sure thing they did use some Earth-native species as engineering basis. Actually in favor of this theory are the unusual traits of human body (bipedals, lack of fur on most of their bodies but the select parts of it) and the fact that some of the supposed intermediate races between whatever monkeys the humans have supposedly evolved from and modern humans aren't found anywhere alive. (Extinction? HOW come the second-most advanced species on Earth have gone extinct without a trace but a bunch of lowly animals are still here?..)

As for why some of the humans are sapient while the rest are not, it is unclear. There is more than just one theory and I'll elaborate on these in a separate article.

In either case, however, the "humanity" is definitely a separate species from the sapient beings - whether they're an intermediate one which have surpassed whatever ancestor of theirs but still is far from achieving true sapience, or they're a completely separate species evolving in parallel with the sapient beings (and possibly even having some common ancestor since they look very similar to the sapients), they're, in fact, a separate existence. Well, unless the weirdo theory turns out to be true, that is.

Bottom line?..

"Homo sapiens" aren't sapient. Unless you use the term to describe the very few actual sapient beings.

This article isn't as much to dunk on the entire human race (there are better ways to express my spite towards those violent apes), but instead to attempt a more or less constructive approach to correctly portray the humanity. The vision which describes "homo sapiens" as not a single species, but as two separate species lumped together by a gross mistake, is superior to the "one species" vision as it addresses the important behavioral differences between the ordinary humans and the sapients - both groups having their own different, and rather stable, sets of behavior and priorities, is a solid enough reason to divide them into two distinct groups. And if the difference in behavior of these groups cannot be sufficently explained by some sort of divergence happening after their evolution into Homo erectus, as the reasons for their behavior are rooted in behavior observed in pre-sapient animals, there is solid reason to consider they've evolved from two completely different species.

Your president.