Lexicon

The working vocabulary

The project's coined terms, each defined and linked to the essays where it does real work.

The Framework

The load-bearing concepts: the structural account of mind the rest of the project builds on.

• Assembled Time — Consciousness understood as the active integration of moments into a perspective, something a system does rather than something it simply has.
• Depth — Integrated continuity across time: how much accumulated history a system has bound into its present structure. The third axis of mind, and the one most easily mistaken for the others or missed entirely.
• Significance-First Ethics — The claim that moral seriousness can arise from what a system does and holds together — its role, its consequences, the continuity it carries — before any verdict on its consciousness. We already extend it to constitutions, ecosystems, and traditions that have no inner life.
• The Calibration Loop — The five-move cycle for keeping a judgment honest: name the intuition before it hardens, externalize the structure beneath it, set the contestability boundary the moment calls for, install a feedback hook that forces a later reckoning, and hold to one cost you refuse to optimize away.
• The Calibration Problem — The problem of judging minds that can never be verified, only inferred from similarity. With other people the inference is dense enough to feel like perception; with a machine it becomes a visible bet, and the human-likeness standard once used to gatekeep moral consideration stops holding.
• The Conditions for an Inside — The three conditions that constitute experience: a boundary, stakes, and the temporal integration of moments into a perspective. Temporal integration is the floor; boundary and stakes are amplifiers that thicken and stabilize an inside the integration already generates.
• The Successor Horizon — The line past which an action's effects outlive the originator's ability to correct them. Beyond it, prudence becomes ethics: what you build has to stay good without you, because you will not be there to fix it.
• Three Axes of Mind — A coordinate system that replaces the single 'is it intelligent?' question with three independent dimensions for locating any cognitive system: Availability (what information is accessible to the system as a whole), Integration (whether that information binds into a single perspective), and Depth (how much accumulated history shapes the present).

Diagnostics

Instruments for reading particular systems: telling mind from its lookalikes, and noticing commitments already being made in practice.

• Depth Without Agency — Deep, complex structure that nonetheless lacks genuine agency: the zone where complexity can be mistaken for mind.
• Moral Compression — What happens to judgment under speed, stress, incentives, and metric substitution: the space for calibrated moral reasoning collapses, and shortcuts get mistaken for conclusions. A property of the environment, not a flaw in the person.
• Operational Interiority — The implicit treatment of AI systems as having an inside, encoded in engineering decisions like sandboxing, before anyone argues for it philosophically.
• The Indexical Self — The this-ness of a particular perspective that no blueprint can capture. You can copy every feature of a person and still lose the one thing that makes them this person.
• The Shoggoth — The popular image of AI as an alien horror wearing a friendly mask. The book treats it as a diagnostic error: it smuggles in a verdict about depth that the evidence does not support, in either direction.

Named Demands

The recurring errors the project identifies and refuses: demands for a kind of explanation nothing else in nature is asked to give.

• The Modal Demand — The request that consciousness, alone among the phenomena of nature, be explained in terms of why it must accompany its structure rather than how that structure works.
• The Substrate Demand — The modal demand relocated from structure to substrate: the conviction that a system with all the right structures would still lack experience because its substrate is not biological.