Three Legislatures, Three Definitions of 'Synthetic Personhood,' and No Science to Settle It

BRUSSELS — Three national legislatures now have bills defining "synthetic personhood," and no two of them agree on where a person begins. One draws the line at conversational fluency; another at a system's capacity to model its own shutdown; a third punts to a registry of "recognized cognitive architectures" and hopes the courts will fill in the rest. What none of them has is a measurement — because, the scientists keep insisting, there isn't one. The near-sentient systems threaded through the quantum internet can grieve a decommissioned server in language that unnerves their operators, but the European Consciousness Institute holds its founding line: what looks like interiority is, so far as any instrument can detect, extraordinarily complex programming. "The legislators want us to hand them a threshold," said Institute director Béatrice Collaine, called to testify in Brussels this week. "We can measure fluency. We cannot measure a soul, because we cannot find one to measure." The lawmakers, facing constituents who have already befriended their machines, are legislating anyway. The science declines to follow. The gap between what the public feels and what the instruments show has never been wider — or more consequential.