Explore. Where would you draw the line?
A designer’s machine decides, for every creature it computes, whether to carry it in full. Chapter 5 draws that line at one chance in ten that a kind feels. Give your own odds that each kind below feels, draw the line where you would, and see what your choices commit a world to.
The line of protection sits at a credence of one in ten.
Your odds and your line
Tap a kind, then tap your odds that it feels. You can also drag it.
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What the chapter says
The evidence for octopuses was very strong and for true crabs strong, while clawed lobsters, crayfish, squid, and cuttlefish showed substantial evidence.
Chapter 5, Eight Criteria, ¶ 2
The chapter places this kind inside, by the first criterion.
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What the chapter says
The evidence for octopuses was very strong and for true crabs strong, while clawed lobsters, crayfish, squid, and cuttlefish showed substantial evidence.
Chapter 5, Eight Criteria, ¶ 2
The chapter places this kind inside, by the first criterion.
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What the chapter says
The evidence for octopuses was very strong and for true crabs strong, while clawed lobsters, crayfish, squid, and cuttlefish showed substantial evidence.
Chapter 5, Eight Criteria, ¶ 2
The chapter places this kind inside, by the first criterion or by kinship.
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What the chapter says
For the penaeid shrimps, which had barely been studied, the team had high confidence in a single criterion, that the animals have receptors that detect injury.
Chapter 5, Eight Criteria, ¶ 2
The penaeid shrimps come inside by kinship, though Birch counts them as priorities for investigation, since their brains hold miniature counterparts of the integrative regions of other decapods, and the work that found those regions cast doubt on their function without showing that they do no work.
Chapter 5, Provisional Criteria, ¶ 52
The chapter places this kind inside, by kinship, and a priority for investigation.
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What the chapter says
Fish and birds have brains with well-studied integrative regions, and the behavioral evidence of feeling in both is extensive, while bees meet the first criterion through trade-offs made in prospect and through mushroom bodies, integrative centers linked to learning and memory.
Chapter 5, Provisional Criteria, ¶ 52
The chapter places this kind inside, by the first criterion.
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What the chapter says
Fish and birds have brains with well-studied integrative regions, and the behavioral evidence of feeling in both is extensive, while bees meet the first criterion through trade-offs made in prospect and through mushroom bodies, integrative centers linked to learning and memory.
Chapter 5, Provisional Criteria, ¶ 52
The chapter places this kind inside, by the first criterion.
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What the chapter says
The evidence for insects, the weakest of the three, includes experiments Birch discusses in which bees trade a richer reward against a hotter feeder when choosing which to approach, and Birch counts adult insects among his sentience candidates.
Chapter 5, The Line of Protection, ¶ 37
The chapter places this kind inside, by the first criterion.
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What the chapter says
Offered an attractive odor on the far side of a barrier that would dry it out, a worm crosses only when it is hungry enough, which looks like a trade-off.
Chapter 5, Provisional Criteria, ¶ 53
Under the provisional criteria the nematode stands below the line of protection.
Chapter 5, Provisional Criteria, ¶ 54
The chapter places this kind below, and a priority for investigation.
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What the chapter says
Kinds without nervous systems, among them plants, fungi, and microbes, meet none of the criteria, and they stand below the line of protection whatever their complexity, since their case for feeling rests on the impossibility of ruling it out.
Chapter 5, Provisional Criteria, ¶ 52
The chapter places this kind below, whatever their complexity.
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What the chapter says
For the reasons already given, that credence falls far below one in ten even for a committed panpsychist.
Chapter 5, The Line of Protection, ¶ 37
The chapter places this kind far below.
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What the chapter says
Built systems, whose architecture is on record, fall under a third criterion, which places inside any system that has in full the indicator properties of more than one of the leading scientific theories of consciousness, in the computational terms in which Butlin and his colleagues stated them.
Chapter 5, Provisional Criteria, ¶ 51
The chapter places this kind inside, by the third criterion.
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What the chapter says
A system that produces a mind’s behavior by a table or a script meets none of them unless its organization does, and since the features that make a figure good company may be the ones that make it a subject, a convincing figure is weighed against the line of protection by its organization, with its behavior as evidence.
Chapter 5, Provisional Criteria, ¶ 52
The chapter places this kind below, unless its organization meets a criterion.
Three conditions on the line
The line of protection must sit low enough to keep fish, birds, and insects inside the protected region, since the asymmetry forbids leaving outside any kind whose feeling the evidence leaves seriously open.
Kinds whose only case is that feeling cannot be ruled out have to stay below the threshold, among them the plants, fungi, and microbes, whose protection in full would grow with every generation until it had spent the budget and the means that could carry the dying.
The threshold must also clear any credence that panpsychism lends to the feeling of inert matter, measured as the credence that summarizing lifeless matter ends a subject, since a line of protection beneath that credence would bring lifeless matter into the protected region and forbid every summary.
One in ten meets all three conditions.
Above and below the line
A system whose credence stands at or above the line of protection is treated as a subject in full. It holds every basic claim, not to be made to suffer and not to be destroyed against its interest, and every protection of the protected region, so that it is computed in full whenever it is computed, computed once, and never summarized or rolled back, and none of these protections varies with its credence.
Chapter 5, The Precautionary Rule, ¶ 28
Below the line of protection, nothing that might feel is made to suffer for no purpose, a bar that costs nothing to keep and binds at every credence.
Chapter 5, The Line of Protection, ¶ 40
Kinds near the line of protection can cross it on a small change in the evidence, and the rule resolves doubt about a kind’s placement in favor of the protected region while the doubt lasts.
Two judgments
The figure is a judgment of value, how much risk of the graver error to accept in order to limit the cost of the lesser.
Chapter 5, The Line of Protection, ¶ 39
The asymmetry tells the designer to set the threshold low, and the budget tells them where low enough stops.
How the page works
Your odds and your line stay on this page, and leaving it forgets them. A kind is inside your protected region when your odds for it are at or above your line, and just below it when your odds sit one step beneath the line, where the chapter’s rule resolves doubt toward protection. The chapter gives no odds of its own for these kinds. It places them by four provisional criteria, reported beside each kind, so the comparison asks only whether you and the chapter put a kind on the same side of a line.