From b2ca47db97f42e688725e068e3ee1c27dfb9c988 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: tegwick Date: Mon, 28 Sep 2026 20:33:09 +0200 Subject: [PATCH] Implement SOUL-WP-0010: P1-P12 itemization, instrument scoping, legal precedent survey - T01: itemize P1-P12 in concepts/personhood.md with per-code defining questions and anchors (Dennett cluster SF-R093, trait/social-cognitive personality psychology SF-R094), matching B1-B8 specificity - T02: research/instrument-scoping-b3-psychological-continuity.md scopes candidate instruments for constitutive integration (B3) and psychological continuity - T03: research/law-governance/legal-personhood-precedent-survey.md, charter scope item 1 only, cross-referenced from the charter - Workplan finished; residual (instrument build gate) recorded as open hub decision 0401cf28; stale "left proposed" prose corrected Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 Assistant: claude-code Assistant-Model: sonnet Assistant-Process: 234768@bnt-lap001 Assistant-Session: 91cdb0c1-a203-431c-b542-cf192b3930a6 --- concepts/personhood.md | 41 ++++--- ...ent-scoping-b3-psychological-continuity.md | 95 ++++++++++++++++ .../legal-personhood-precedent-survey.md | 105 ++++++++++++++++++ .../moral-legal-personhood-charter.md | 8 +- ...-WP-0010-metrics-and-personhood-mapping.md | 40 +++++-- 5 files changed, 265 insertions(+), 24 deletions(-) create mode 100644 research/instrument-scoping-b3-psychological-continuity.md create mode 100644 research/law-governance/legal-personhood-precedent-survey.md diff --git a/concepts/personhood.md b/concepts/personhood.md index 5f5f5d4..30978db 100644 --- a/concepts/personhood.md +++ b/concepts/personhood.md @@ -1,6 +1,6 @@ # Personhood -**Status:** revised (Phase III, 2026-08-12) +**Status:** revised (Phase IX, 2026-09-28 — P1–P12 itemized, SOUL-WP-0010-T01) **See also:** H2, RQ2, APE, RN-003, `research/personhood/personhood-dimensions-map.md` ## Working definition @@ -22,22 +22,31 @@ legal status. ## Descriptive profile (P1–P12) -| ID | Dimension | -|---|---| -| P1 | Self-model | -| P2 | Other-model | -| P3 | Relationship model | -| P4 | Character | -| P5 | Intentional organization | -| P6 | Autobiographical integration | -| P7 | Perspective (entity-relative; not solved consciousness) | -| P8 | Commitments | -| P9 | Social reciprocity | -| P10 | Communicative competence | -| P11 | Responsibility-tracking | -| P12 | Value / preference structure | +Itemized to the same specificity as B1–B8 (`concepts/being.md`), per +SOUL-WP-0010-T01. P1–P9 from RN-003; P10–P12 added in Phase III. Full map: +`research/personhood/personhood-dimensions-map.md`. Literature basis: +Dennett cluster conditions (SF-R093); trait and social-cognitive +personality psychology (SF-R094). -Profile, not binary checklist. +| ID | Dimension | Defining question | Anchors | +|---|---|---|---| +| P1 | Self-model | Does it maintain a model of itself as a distinct, continuing entity? | SM2; identity; Dennett self-representation condition | +| P2 | Other-model | Does it hold differentiated models of particular others (not just user classes)? | SM3; social cognition / theory-of-mind tradition | +| P3 | Relationship model | Does it track histories and states of specific relationships? | SM5; Soul (relation) | +| P4 | Character | Does it show persistent dispositions across contexts — stable yet situation-sensitive (trait × situation, CAPS-style), not a fixed script? | Character; SF-R094 Big Five / Mischel | +| P5 | Intentional organization | Is its behavior intelligible via extended intentions and plans, beyond single-step stimulus–response? | Mind; agency; Dennett intentional-system condition (SF-R080/R093) | +| P6 | Autobiographical integration | Does it integrate past events as *its own* history? | continuity C4/C5; Schechtman characterization question | +| P7 | Perspective | Does it operate from an entity-relative informational perspective? (First-person indexicality; explicitly **not** solved phenomenal consciousness.) | RN-003; design boundary | +| P8 | Commitments | Do its present acts bind its future manifestations (promises, stances, obligations)? | normative continuity | +| P9 | Social reciprocity | Does it recursively co-adapt with others who model it (mutual modeling, not one-way output)? | H4; Social Mind; Dennett reciprocity condition | +| P10 | Communicative competence | Can it participate in shared symbol systems and maintain common ground? | language; Dennett verbal-communication condition | +| P11 | Responsibility-tracking | Can attributions of credit/blame stick to it diachronically? | identity + commitments (P1, P8) | +| P12 | Value / preference structure | Does it exhibit stable cares, preferences, and an evaluative stance? | character; intentional organization; Frankfurt second-order volitions | + +Profile, not binary checklist — score per code; entities can be high on P10 +and low on P4/P6 (stateless chatbot), or high on B1–B8 and low across +P1–P12 (daemon). Per-code enumeration is the prerequisite for per-code +metric scoping (`research/metrics-scoping-note.md`). ## Three axes diff --git a/research/instrument-scoping-b3-psychological-continuity.md b/research/instrument-scoping-b3-psychological-continuity.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f539e4c --- /dev/null +++ b/research/instrument-scoping-b3-psychological-continuity.md @@ -0,0 +1,95 @@ +# Instrument Scoping — Constitutive Integration (B3) and Psychological Continuity + +**Workplan:** SOUL-WP-0010-T02, resolved 2026-09-28 +**Follows:** `research/metrics-scoping-note.md` (SOUL-WP-0009-T04) +**Purpose:** scope — not build — candidate operational approaches for the two +dimensions the metrics note marked **No existing instrument** while carrying +the most argumentative weight across the thought-experiment catalog +(TE-02, TE-04, TE-05, TE-08). + +Scoping, in this note's sense: name a candidate operational approach, say +what it would measure and what it would miss, and judge whether it is +viable enough to justify a build effort — or state explicitly that none is. + +--- + +## 1. B3 — Constitutive integration + +**Target claim to operationalize:** the system is one *integrated +organization*, not loosely coupled components (decisive in TE-05 The +Collective: "at which level does self-individuating organization close?"; +load-bearing in TE-04 for what survives gradual replacement). + +### Candidate approaches + +| # | Approach | What it measures | What it misses | +|---|---|---|---| +| 1 | **Constraint-closure ratio** (operationalizing Montévil & Mossio 2015): over a dependency graph of the system's processes and the constraints acting on them, the fraction of constraints that are themselves produced/maintained by processes inside the candidate boundary | Degree of organizational closure at a chosen boundary; directly comparable across candidate levels (member vs. collective — exactly TE-05's question) | Graph construction is modeler-dependent; no canonical granularity for "a process" | +| 2 | **Integration/segregation measures from network science** (participation coefficient, modularity Q, global efficiency) applied to the component-interaction graph | Whether interaction structure is one integrated module or several weakly coupled ones | Measures topology, not constitution — a message bus scores "integrated" without any self-maintenance | +| 3 | **Perturbation-propagation profiling**: ablate or degrade one component; measure how widely and how fast compensatory adjustment propagates | Functional (not just topological) integration; cheap to run on artificial systems | Conflates integration with fragility unless compensation is distinguished from cascade failure | +| 4 | IIT-style integrated-information approximations (Φ proxies) | Principled "more than the sum of parts" formalization | Computationally intractable beyond toy systems; imports contested consciousness commitments Soul Frame deliberately avoids (P7 boundary) | + +### Judgment + +**Viable candidate exists.** The recommended composite is **1 + 3**: +constraint-closure ratio as the structural instrument, validated against +perturbation-propagation profiling as the behavioral check (a genuinely +integrated organization should show closure *and* distributed +compensation). Approach 2 is a cheap screening proxy only; approach 4 is +**rejected** for Soul Frame use — cost and consciousness entanglement. + +For artificial systems the raw material (dependency graphs, service +telemetry, chaos-engineering-style perturbation runs) already exists in +production tooling; the invention needed is the mapping and the closure +criterion, not the data collection. This parallels the metrics note's B4 +finding ("needs mapping, not invention") more closely than its flat "No" +suggested — B3 is *buildable*, not measurable-today. + +--- + +## 2. Psychological continuity + +**Target claim to operationalize:** "the same adaptive/modeling process" +persists over time — as distinct from *similar outputs* (the metrics +note's explicit objection to output-based proxies). Load-bearing in TE-02 +(is the restored process the same one?), TE-04 (H6 channel under gradual +replacement), TE-08 (degraded continuity when the autobiographical channel +fails). + +### Candidate approaches + +| # | Approach | What it measures | What it misses | +|---|---|---|---| +| 1 | **Representational continuity**: compare internal state-space *structure* across time slices (representational similarity analysis between model snapshots — geometry of the representation space, not I/O behavior) | Whether the modeling process itself evolved continuously vs. was swapped for a behavioral look-alike; directly answers the "same process, not similar outputs" requirement | Requires white-box access; no established threshold for "continuous enough"; substrate-specific (embedding spaces vs. neural recordings don't compare) | +| 2 | **Overlapping-chains connectedness** (Parfitian chains operationalized): connectedness of the retrieval graph over the autobiographical store — do current states causally draw on states that drew on earlier states, in overlapping spans? | Graded continuity that degrades the way TE-08 needs (severe amnesia → sparse graph → DEGRADED, not binary death) | Measures the memory channel only (C4/C5-adjacent); a process could stay "the same" while its store is pruned | +| 3 | **Longitudinal disposition profiling**: repeated CAPS-style if-then situation×response probes (SF-R094), tracking profile drift over time | Behavioral-level continuity of character/valuation (P4, P12) without white-box access | It is exactly an output-similarity measure — the thing the metrics note warns is *adjacent to*, not identical with, process continuity | + +### Judgment + +**Viable candidate exists, with a caveat.** **Approach 1** is the only +candidate that measures the continuity claim itself rather than a +correlate; it should be primary. Approach 2 is a complementary channel +instrument (autobiographical continuity specifically), and approach 3 is +**admissible only as corroborating evidence**, never as the operational +definition — otherwise the instrument re-imports the output-similarity +error the metrics note flagged. + +Caveat: approach 1 is currently substrate-specific. A cross-substrate +psychological-continuity metric remains out of reach; what is scoped here +is an instrument *for artificial systems with inspectable internals*. + +--- + +## 3. Overall conclusion + +Both dimensions clear the scoping bar set by SOUL-WP-0010-T02's done +condition: at least one candidate operational approach each — +**constraint-closure ratio + perturbation profiling** for B3; +**representational continuity** (with overlapping-chains as channel +instrument) for psychological continuity. Neither is viable *today* as a +validated metric; both are viable *build targets* with no missing +theoretical prerequisite. + +Whether to actually build/pilot either instrument is a founder-gated +prioritization question, recorded as a hub decision (origin: residual, +SOUL-WP-0010) rather than opened as a workplan here. diff --git a/research/law-governance/legal-personhood-precedent-survey.md b/research/law-governance/legal-personhood-precedent-survey.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..9ccc4b0 --- /dev/null +++ b/research/law-governance/legal-personhood-precedent-survey.md @@ -0,0 +1,105 @@ +# Legal Personhood Precedent Survey (Companion Line — Slice 1) + +**Workplan:** SOUL-WP-0010-T03, resolved 2026-09-28 +**Charter:** `moral-legal-personhood-charter.md` — this note executes charter +scope item 1 **only**. Moral status (item 2) and the non-derivation +statement (item 3) are explicitly **not** attempted here. +**Extends:** `sp-gh-legal-gap-sketch.md` (§1 mapping row "Being → +legal person: fit poor/direct"). +**Non-goal:** no derivation of moral or legal status from Soul Frame +descriptive concepts; no jurisdiction-specific legal advice. Jurisdictional +variance is tracked, not averaged (charter item 4). + +--- + +## 1. Corporate personhood — the fiat baseline + +| Precedent | Jurisdiction | Holding / significance | +|---|---|---| +| *Salomon v A Salomon & Co* (1897) | UK | Separate legal personality of the company even with one dominant shareholder; personality as legal construction, not description | +| *Santa Clara County v Southern Pacific* (1886) | US | Headnote origin of corporate constitutional personhood under the 14th Amendment | +| *Citizens United v FEC* (2010) | US | Corporate political-speech rights; personality bundle expands by doctrine, not by any change in the entity | +| *Burwell v Hobby Lobby* (2014) | US | Closely-held corporations exercise religious rights — bundle extends to interests classically "personal" | + +**Pattern:** legal personality is a *functional grant* serving legal-system +purposes (asset partitioning, standing, liability channeling). The bearer +has essentially **no descriptive personhood profile** (P1–P12 ≈ 0 at the +corporate level; cf. RN-003 §8 corporate false-positive risk, TE-05) — +maximal proof that legal personality and descriptive personhood are +independent axes. + +## 2. Animal law — capacities without personality + +| Precedent | Jurisdiction | Holding / significance | +|---|---|---| +| NhRP *Tommy* / *Kiko* line (2014–2018, NY) | US | Habeas for chimpanzees denied; courts leaned on rights–duties reciprocity ("social contract" reasoning) | +| *NhRP v Breheny* ("Happy" the elephant, 2022, NY Court of Appeals) | US | Habeas denied 5–2; strong dissents (Wilson, Rivera) arguing personality is a legal conclusion, not a biological fact | +| *Sandra* orangutan (2015, Buenos Aires) | Argentina | Court language of "non-human subject of rights"; effect largely welfare-based | +| *Cecilia* chimpanzee (2016, Mendoza) | Argentina | Habeas **granted**; explicitly declared a non-human legal person for the writ's purpose | + +**Pattern:** the mirror image of §1 — entities with a **non-trivial +descriptive profile** (self/other-models, social reciprocity) are mostly +*denied* legal personality, with courts citing duty-bearing capacity, not +descriptive capacities. Where granted (Cecilia), the grant is narrow and +purpose-bound. Confirms: descriptive profile neither necessary (§1) nor +sufficient (§2) for legal personality. + +## 3. Environmental / other non-human grants — personality as governance instrument + +| Precedent | Jurisdiction | Holding / significance | +|---|---|---| +| Te Awa Tupua Act (2017) | New Zealand | Whanganui River as legal person with statutory human guardians (Te Pou Tupua) | +| Ganges/Yamuna, Uttarakhand HC (2017) | India | Rivers declared legal persons; **stayed** by the Supreme Court — grants can be revoked/suspended | +| Rights of Nature, Constitution art. 71 (2008) | Ecuador | Constitutional-level standing for nature | + +**Pattern:** legal personality used as a **custodianship/standing +mechanism** — personality plus mandatory human guardians. Structurally the +closest existing template to the gap sketch's missing "Gh. custodianship +instrument" (§1, §3.4 there): a legal person that cannot represent itself, +represented by appointed authorities with defined scope. + +## 4. AI legal personality — proposals, not precedent + +| Item | Status | +|---|---| +| Solum, "Legal Personhood for Artificial Intelligences" (1992, NC L Rev) | Foundational scholarly framing: personality as bundle; capacity objections answerable case-by-case | +| EU Parliament resolution on Civil Law Rules on Robotics (2017/2103(INL)) | Proposed exploring "electronic personhood" for sophisticated autonomous robots | +| Open letter from AI/robotics/law experts (2018) | Opposed electronic personhood as liability-shielding; influential in the retreat | +| EP resolution 2020/2014(INL) on AI civil liability | Retreat: liability routed to existing persons (operator/producer); no electronic person | +| Bryson, Diamantis & Grant, "Of, for, and by the people" (2017, AI & Law) | "Synthetic persons" legally possible but a policy mistake: personality without effective sanctionability creates a liability lacuna | + +**Pattern:** the live AI debate is **not** about descriptive capacities but +about *liability engineering* — who absorbs harm costs. The strongest +objection (Bryson et al.) is that personality without punishability +decouples rights from accountability: in Soul Frame terms, the law cares +about something like P8/P11 (commitments, responsibility-tracking) +*enforceability*, not about the descriptive profile as such. + +--- + +## 5. Cross-cutting findings (for the companion line, not the descriptive core) + +1. **Fiat and functional.** Every grant surveyed serves a legal-system + purpose; none tracks a descriptive threshold. The gap sketch's "fit: + poor/direct" for Being → legal person is confirmed across all four + clusters. +2. **Personality is a divisible bundle.** Partial, purpose-bound grants + (Cecilia's habeas-only personhood, river guardianship) are normal — + "legal person" names a family of bundles, not one status. +3. **Double decoupling.** No-profile entities hold rich bundles (§1); + rich-profile entities are denied them (§2). Any future Soul Frame + moral/legal mapping must treat legal personality as an independent + variable, never a derivable one. +4. **Guardianship is the load-bearing template.** For Sp./Gh. governance + questions, §3's guardian-plus-person construction is the precedent + family to develop further, not §1's self-directed corporate model. +5. **Jurisdictional variance is severe** — common-law habeas strategies, + civil-law subject-of-rights language, statutory grants, and + constitutional provisions behave differently; per charter item 4 this + table tracks, and must not average, them. + +## 6. Residual (explicitly not opened here) + +Charter items 2 (moral status survey) and 3 (non-derivation statement) +remain future slices of the companion line, gated per the charter's own +next-step rule. diff --git a/research/law-governance/moral-legal-personhood-charter.md b/research/law-governance/moral-legal-personhood-charter.md index bbc8e0a..34b6a6e 100644 --- a/research/law-governance/moral-legal-personhood-charter.md +++ b/research/law-governance/moral-legal-personhood-charter.md @@ -22,7 +22,9 @@ core to get there — by defining a companion line with its own scope. ## Scope (what the companion line would cover) -1. **Legal personhood precedent survey** — corporate personhood, animal +1. **Legal personhood precedent survey** — ✅ first slice executed as + `legal-personhood-precedent-survey.md` (SOUL-WP-0010-T03, 2026-09-28) — + corporate personhood, animal welfare/rights law, AI legal-personality proposals (e.g. EU robot- personhood debate), personality/publicity rights (`SF-R110`), digital estates (`SF-R111`) — building outward from the existing gap sketch in @@ -77,3 +79,7 @@ scoped narrowly enough (e.g. "legal personhood precedent survey only" as a first slice) to avoid re-opening the whole moral/legal question at once. Not opened now — SOUL-WP-0009-T05's done condition is this charter existing, not the companion line's work starting. + +**Update 2026-09-28:** the first slice was picked up exactly as scoped — +SOUL-WP-0010-T03 produced `legal-personhood-precedent-survey.md` (item 1 +only). Items 2–4 remain unstarted future slices. diff --git a/workplans/SOUL-WP-0010-metrics-and-personhood-mapping.md b/workplans/SOUL-WP-0010-metrics-and-personhood-mapping.md index 270f9dd..464e9a7 100644 --- a/workplans/SOUL-WP-0010-metrics-and-personhood-mapping.md +++ b/workplans/SOUL-WP-0010-metrics-and-personhood-mapping.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ type: workplan title: "Phase IX — P-axis enumeration, metrics instruments, and moral/legal companion line (slice 1)" domain: agents repo: soul-frame -status: active +status: finished flavor: residual origin: residual origin_ref: SOUL-WP-0009 @@ -33,9 +33,8 @@ and should not sit only as prose in their source notes: first narrow slice ("legal personhood precedent survey only") rather than opening the whole moral/legal question at once. -This workplan bundles both as a first slice. **Left `proposed`** — not -reviewed against current repo state or started; needs Bernd's go-ahead -before promotion to `ready`/`active`, same as SOUL-WP-0009 was. +This workplan bundles both as a first slice. Activated 2026-09-28 with +Bernd's go-ahead; all three tasks resolved the same day. ## Depends on @@ -47,7 +46,7 @@ before promotion to `ready`/`active`, same as SOUL-WP-0009 was. ```task id: SOUL-WP-0010-T01 -status: todo +status: done priority: medium state_hub_task_id: "598c52c1-5902-541f-bff0-78a8700ce4ed" ``` @@ -67,7 +66,7 @@ specificity. ```task id: SOUL-WP-0010-T02 -status: todo +status: done priority: low state_hub_task_id: "1ae4434f-8603-5c71-aa59-add71bff24aa" ``` @@ -86,7 +85,7 @@ approach per dimension, or explicitly states none is currently viable. ```task id: SOUL-WP-0010-T03 -status: todo +status: done priority: low state_hub_task_id: "f29ae5a5-0ede-57c2-9963-50580f5cf6db" ``` @@ -99,3 +98,30 @@ status or the non-derivation statement (charter items 2–3) in this slice. **Done when:** a precedent survey note exists, explicitly scoped to legal personhood only, cross-referenced from the charter. + +--- + +## Outcome (2026-09-28) + +- **T01** — `concepts/personhood.md` now carries an itemized P1–P12 table + (defining question + anchors per code), sourced from the Phase III + dimensions map, SF-R093 (Dennett cluster) and SF-R094 (trait / + social-cognitive personality psychology). Unblocks per-code metric + scoping. +- **T02** — `research/instrument-scoping-b3-psychological-continuity.md`: + viable build targets named for both dimensions (B3: constraint-closure + ratio + perturbation profiling; psychological continuity: + representational continuity, white-box systems only). Neither viable as + a validated metric today. +- **T03** — `research/law-governance/legal-personhood-precedent-survey.md`: + four precedent clusters (corporate, animal, environmental, AI + proposals), legal-personhood-only per charter item 1; cross-referenced + from the charter. Key finding: double decoupling of legal personality + from descriptive profile; guardianship grants (§3) are the template + relevant to Gh. custodianship. + +**Residual:** whether to build/pilot the two scoped instruments is +founder-gated — recorded as open hub decision +`0401cf28-48bb-4486-87cc-b1dfd6903d0d` (origin: residual, origin_ref: +SOUL-WP-0010-T02). Charter items 2–4 stay future companion-line slices +gated by the charter itself, not residuals of this workplan.