Mind assessment · a system assessed against published criteria

No test can show that a system is conscious. What we have are checklists of properties that the evidence, or the leading theories, link to experience. Pick a checklist, mark the properties the system has, and read the result the way the source would.

The eight criteria from Birch and colleagues (2021), the review behind the UK’s decision to recognise decapod crustaceans and cephalopod molluscs as sentient. Start from one of its published findings, or mark your own. Published finding:

Criteria met

1The animal possesses receptors sensitive to noxious stimuli (nociceptors)
2The animal possesses integrative brain regions capable of integrating information from different sensory sources
3The animal possesses neural pathways connecting the nociceptors to the integrative brain regions
4The animal's behavioural response to a noxious stimulus is modulated by chemical compounds affecting the nervous system (e.g. local anaesthetics, analgesics, opioid-type systems)
5The animal shows motivational trade-offs, in which the disvalue of a noxious or threatening stimulus is weighed against the value of an opportunity for reward, leading to flexible decision-making
6The animal shows flexible self-protective behaviour (e.g. wound-tending, guarding, grooming, rubbing) of a type likely to involve representing the bodily location of an injury or noxious stimulus
7The animal shows associative learning in which noxious stimuli become associated with neutral stimuli, and/or novel ways of avoiding noxious stimuli are learned through reinforcement (habituation and sensitisation do not count)
8The animal shows that it values a putative analgesic or anaesthetic when injured (e.g. self-administers it, or learns to prefer a location where it is available)

Result

0 of 8 criteria met

The review’s grading would call this sentience unknown or unlikely.

A checklist describes evidence. It doesn’t settle whether anything is felt.

Link format

The whole state of this page lives in its link, so a link can be written by hand, by a script or by an agent. Parameters for /score:

m: mode. n animal (sentience criteria), a AI system (consciousness indicators)
b: one digit per criterion, in order, `1` met and `0` not met. 8 digits in animal mode, 14 in AI mode. Animal criteria, in order: (1) The animal possesses receptors sensitive to noxious stimuli (nociceptors) (2) The animal possesses integrative brain regions capable of integrating information from different sensory sources (3) The animal possesses neural pathways connecting the nociceptors to the integrative brain regions (4) The animal's behavioural response to a noxious stimulus is modulated by chemical compounds affecting the nervous system (e.g. local anaesthetics, analgesics, opioid-type systems) (5) The animal shows motivational trade-offs, in which the disvalue of a noxious or threatening stimulus is weighed against the value of an opportunity for reward, leading to flexible decision-making (6) The animal shows flexible self-protective behaviour (e.g. wound-tending, guarding, grooming, rubbing) of a type likely to involve representing the bodily location of an injury or noxious stimulus (7) The animal shows associative learning in which noxious stimuli become associated with neutral stimuli, and/or novel ways of avoiding noxious stimuli are learned through reinforcement (habituation and sensitisation do not count) (8) The animal shows that it values a putative analgesic or anaesthetic when injured (e.g. self-administers it, or learns to prefer a location where it is available) AI indicators, in order: RPT-1, RPT-2, GWT-1, GWT-2, GWT-3, GWT-4, HOT-1, HOT-2, HOT-3, HOT-4, AST-1, PP-1, AE-1, AE-2
p: optional: a published row of the 2021 review, animal mode only. 0 Octopods, 1 Cuttlefish, 2 Other coleoids (squid), 3 Nautiloids, 4 True crabs (Brachyura), 5 Anomuran crabs, 6 Astacid lobsters/crayfish, 7 Spiny lobsters, 8 Caridean shrimps, 9 Penaeid shrimps

Example: https://simulation-hypothesis.com/score?m=a&b=11110000000000. The same for every tool, and the site’s open data, at /llms.txt.