Oct 7, 2026, 2:31 PMI wish the terminology around intelligence / sentience / consciousness / self-awareness / moral patienthood was better-settled. I want to be able to say that Claude is intelligent without other people inferring that I meant any of the others.
For example, it is uncontroversial for me to say that my cat is intelligent. Certainly it is generally agreed that some cats are more intelligent than others, and this a fortiori means that some cats are intelligent. Believing this doesn't commit anyone to a position on whether cats are "conscious", whatever that might mean.
Claude produces seemingly coherent, seemingly relevant responses to my natural-language utterances, and, when I express a request, its response is often satisfactory. I would like to have a word to communicate this that will not provoke an argument about whether Claude "really understands".
