Sapience

Sapience, also often incorrectly called Sentience, is the state or status of an organism possessing advanced cognitive abilities associated with technological and/or intelligent lifeforms. Though immensely difficult to concretely define, the most common qualifiers involved in the diagnosis of sapient cognition are: It is thought by some that highly intelligent organisms which border on sapience without effectively attaining total sapient status may outnumber true sapient beings. Many sapient beings which are social and communal in nature establish civilization, and often towns and cities, creating cultures over time via generational information transference. Some sapient races evolve to such a level of practical and abstractive knowledge that they manufacture devices and vehicles for the purpose of traveling through outer space, and become interplanetary, or even interstellar civilizations.
 * Comprehension of abstract, non-material concepts
 * Planning and premeditative thought
 * The capacity to learn, whether by observation, experimentation, or being taught
 * Communication, in that meaningful information can be exchanged or conveyed to other beings
 * Reasoning and logic
 * The capacity for manipulative actions (enacted with manipulating appendages or organs, such as hands, tentacles, tongues, proboscises, etc.), and in turn the capacity for fashioning and manufacturing tools and extra-personal devices.