There is no principled continuum of ethical concern that scales from simple homeostatic agents to complex metacognitive beings, allowing rational allocation of moral status

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• What degree of concern and care should we exhibit toward the many diverse agents around us, and what criteria do we use to identify sentience, capacity for suffering, and other properties that have moral implications?question0.803
  Central question motivating the paper.
• Contingent properties like composition, origin, or similarity to human brains should not define ethical consideration for novel agents.claim0.795
  Ethics must be based on empirically-determined cognitive properties (goals, preferences, concerns) rather than parochial markers.
• There is no consensus ethical framework for the creation of new sentient minds — neither for biological children nor for AI — that is grounded in principled theoryquestion0.788
  Identified as a major unsolved problem that AI makes newly urgent
• Intelligence and cognition exist on a continuum; modern bioscience offers no support for clean bright-line distinctions between cognitive and non-cognitive beings.claim0.782
  Anti-essentialism claim: questions like 'is it cognitive?' are scientifically unjustified; modern view must ask 'what kind' and 'how much'.
• A sufficiently deep generative model may recognize that its own homeostatic regulation is embedded in a broader ecological and social network, naturally leading to boundless careclaim0.776
  Speculative claim linking epistemic depth as consciousness mechanism to boundless care as alignment property
• The contemplative principles track the nature of reality rather than moral prescriptions, allowing morality to emerge context-sensitively from fundamental experiencesclaim0.774
  Key epistemological claim justifying why contemplative principles are preferable to rule-based alignment
• Selves exist across a continuum of persuadability.claim0.768
  A system's agency is determined by the most efficient intervention strategy (reward, punishment, argument).
• "Continuum of cognitive capacities—no binary categories, no bright line separating true cognition from 'just physics.'"quote0.768
  Core tenet of TAME from Table 1; foundational to gradualist approach to cognition across all substrates.