soul-frame/research/sufficiency-and-weighting-position.md

Sufficiency and Weighting — Position Paper

Workplan: SOUL-WP-0011-T01, resolved 2026-09-28 Addresses: G1 (history/260928-scope-intent-gap-assessment.md); RQ1/RQ2/RQ5 weighting residuals; paper §17 item 2. Position in one line: Soul Frame rejects universal cardinal weights for its profiles and adopts a structured-qualitative sufficiency scheme: necessity structure for the B-profile, claim-relative minimal profiles for the P-profile, and configuration classes (already in place) for continuity.

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1. Why not weights?

Three arguments, jointly decisive:

1. Incommensurability across substrates. A cardinal weight on P4 (character) vs P10 (communicative competence) asserts an exchange rate between them that would have to hold for a human, a distributed AI, and a radically non-human system alike. No literature tradition surveyed (Dennett cluster conditions SF-R093 explicitly; trait psychology SF-R094 implicitly) licenses such a rate.
2. The scalar re-imports the binary. A weighted sum yields a person-meter with a threshold — precisely the single-mark model the profile approach was built to avoid (H1, H2). The framework would quietly undo its own central move.
3. The fleet of load-bearing judgments never used weights. Every TE working judgment and criteria-document verdict reached so far (TE-01–09; IdentityContinuityCriteria §17) reasons via defeaters and configurations ("no causal grounding → RECONSTRUCTION regardless of similarity"), never via aggregation. The practice is already qualitative-structural; this note makes the position explicit rather than changing it.

A refusal alone would be underspecified ("anything goes"). The scheme below states what replaces weights, per profile.

2. B-profile (B1–B8): necessity core + compensable remainder

• Necessity core: B1 (individuability) and B3 (constitutive integration). A system that cannot be non-arbitrarily individuated, or whose organization does not close at the candidate boundary, is not an autonomous individual at that level however high the other six score. This is exactly the decisive move in TE-05 (which level closes) and the corporate false-positive analysis (RN-003 §8).
• Compensable remainder: B2, B4–B8. Deficits degrade the profile without defeating it (a dormant system fails B2 enactment yet remains a Continuation-Bearing State, TE-02; a heavily assisted system scores low on B5 and shades toward heteronomous individuality without leaving the category).

3. P-profile (P1–P12): no necessity core; claim-relative minimal profiles

Personhood is a genuine cluster concept: no single P-code is necessary (severe P6 loss — TE-08 — does not zero descriptive personhood). But sufficiency questions are always asked for something, and the something fixes a minimal profile:

Claim being made	Minimal profile required
"Sufficient personhood for Beinghood v0.2"	P1 (self-model) + at least one other-directed dimension (P2, P3, or P9) + P10 — because Beinghood's other requirement families (addressability, recognition) presuppose an entity that models itself, can be modeled as a counterpart, and can be addressed
"Strong APE"	any exposed subset; no minimum — APE is defined by exposure, not sufficiency
"Social Beinghood candidate"	the Beinghood row plus P9 specifically (reciprocity is what episode-spanning recognition latches onto)

"Sufficiently coherent … personhood" in Beinghood v0.2 is hereby glossed as this claim-relative minimal profile, not as a score above a threshold. Entities exceeding the minimal profile differ in richness, which the framework reports descriptively and does not rank.

4. Continuity (six channels): configuration classes, causal privilege

The Identity Continuity Criteria already embody the right scheme; this note canonizes two of its properties as the official position:

1. Causal privilege. The causal channel is the only defeater-grade channel: without sufficient direct process continuity the verdict is RECONSTRUCTION (or SUCCESSOR/USURPATION), whatever the similarity elsewhere. This is the criteria document's standing rejection of single-invariant and similarity-score identity, kept as is.
2. Degradation, not summation, for the rest. Organizational, psychological, autobiographical, normative, and relational channel deficits move a claim between configuration classes (CONTINUOUS → DEGRADED_CONTINUATION → …), and the verdict names which channels degraded. No channel arithmetic; the class label plus channel state vector is the complete answer.

5. Consequences

• Beinghood v0.2 phrasing: unchanged in form; "sufficiently" now has a stated semantics (§3). concepts/being.md and Terminology.md need no edit — this note is their referenced backing.
• TE catalog: all existing working judgments are consistent with this scheme (checked against TE-02/04/05/08 explicitly); none needs revision.
• Metrics line (WP-0010): instruments measure single dimensions; building a composite Beinghood/personhood index is out of scope by position, not merely unbuilt. Decision 0401cf28 inherits this constraint.
• Coverage matrix (T02): entity comparisons report profiles and configuration classes, never totals.

6. Status

Defended position, revisable per INTENT's method rule (revise if it collapses distinct phenomena or fails edge cases). The most likely pressure point: whether P10 belongs in the Beinghood minimal profile for radically non-human systems whose "shared symbol system" participation is contested — flagged, not resolved, in the coverage matrix strain notes.