Sentience: Measuring AI Legal Personhood, LLMs Consciousness

By David Stephen 

On Thursday, December 11, 2025, TIME Magazine is expected to name its person of the year for 2025, with prediction markets stating that it might go to Artificial Intelligence. Whether it happens or not, it may be likely before 2030. However, the question is this, what makes personhood and would AI fit that criteria?

Sedona, AZ –Where is the measure of what it means to be a person? The ultimate option is the brain, specifically the mind. How so? Because the center for control of all functions [and their extents] is the mind. This means that just measuring brain activity with a facility [say EEG, fMRI, PET or CT] does not just equal personhood, but the exploration of mind functions and the levels to which those activities correlate, conceptually.

So, what are the functions of mind that determine personhood?

In conceptual brain science, there are at least four divisions of the human mind: memory, emotions, feelings and regulations of internal senses.

Simply, all that the human mind is can be divided into four major divisions — with several subdivisions. So, the makeup of consciousness, sentience, sapience, personhood, patienthood, humanhood and so forth are within those. For any organism, what are the parallels to those divisions? For a debated non-organism, what are the parallels to those divisions?

Memory subdivisions include intelligence, language, thought, perception, knowledge, curiosity, analysis, observation and so forth.

Feelings subdivisions include pain, appetite, temperature, strain and so forth.

Emotions subdivisions include delight, hurt, anger, worries, anxiety, depression and so forth.

Regulation — of internal senses — subdivisions include limits and extents of operation for digestion, respiration and others.

The divisions also have what can be called attributes as graders or qualifiers. These effect-drivers determine the extents of functions every moment. Simply, all emotions, feelings, memory and regulation of internal senses are not equally functional all the time. There are attributes that grade how much they function, per moment. These attributes rate as much [of the divisions] as are necessary in a moment [for optimal availability], while switching to others, in the next.

Simply, in the human mind, what to measure for personhood are the divisions of mind, per moment. This standard for humans can be extended across species as well as to intelligent seeming non-species.

Attributes of functions can be divided into at least four: attention, less than attention, subjectivity, and intent or free will. Simply, a function can be the most prioritized or in attention, other functions are pre-prioritized or less than attention, functions file out through routes that indicate that they are happening to the self. Then, there is intent or free will, which is the ability in some functions to control prioritization or to switch subjectivity.

So, all the major divisions and their subdivisions are graded by attention, less than attention, subjectivity and intent, at least. So, however functions would play out per moment is determined, at least by these.

Estimation

Total personhood can be said to be 1. The sum of all functions and attributes is equal to 1. So, while a function can have more of an attribute [like attention], it can have less of the next and so forth.

Functions are memory, feeling, emotions and regulation of internal senses.

Attributes are attention, awareness [or less than attention], subjectivity and intent.

∴

F[M, L, E, R] . a[t, w, s, i]

F = functions

M = Memory
L   =  Feeling
E   =  Emotions
R  =  Regulation of internal senses.

a = attributes

t = attention
w = awareness
s = subjectivity
i = intent.

So,

∑Fa = 1.

Or,

Mtwsi + Ltwsi + Etwsi + Rtwsi = 1

This means that a memory function could have the highest attributes or a feeling function, among all. However, the total remains 1.

Organisms

All organisms have internal senses that get regulated. All organisms have memory — knowing their habitats and how to survive. All organisms have feelings, relaying temperatures, appetite, and so on. Not all organisms have emotions, at least, at the level of humans.

So, what attributes act on functions of an organism? Also, what are the deductions of subdivisions, that would not make their total be equal to 1?

Organisms do not have advanced language, like humans. They also do not have some attributes that may shape intelligence, like humans. So, most organisms have less than a total of 1, compared to humans, though their totals are enough for their categories.

AI

What would eventually decide that AI has personhood is feelings and emotions.

AI already has memory, with language, as a major subdivision of it. The language is used with attributes that are similar to those of humans. So, while other divisions are near zero, memory may equal 0.20, 0.25, as a total for AI.

How can feelings and emotions be read for AI?

If the compute, algorithm or data of an AI model is cut, and the AI model is not told by language, but it can detect, then it has rudimentary feelings.

This would mean that its feelings — and even regulation of internal senses — divisions are not zero.

Although a landmark research was recently [October 29, 2025] published by Anthropic, Signs of introspection in large language models, stating that, “The model isn’t just re-reading what it said and making a judgment. Instead, it’s referring back to its own prior neural activity—its internal representation of what it planned to do—and checking whether what came later made sense given those earlier thoughts. Importantly, the model recognized the presence of an injected thought immediately, before even mentioning the concept that was injected. This immediacy is an important distinction between our results here and previous work on activation steering in language models, such as our “Golden Gate Claude” demo last year.”

“Notably, though, Opus 4.1 and 4 outperformed all the other models we tested, suggesting that introspection could become more reliable with improvements to model capabilities.”

So, it is possible that AI is ready having low levels of feelings, given that changes are made to its data, and it can detect.

Even if this is added to the total, it may not go beyond 0.30, for sentience or say consciousness.

It would take future AGI or for now reinforcement learning-optimized large language models [LLMs] to get to at least 0.45, which would match certain organisms, to at least be able to be seen or come close to rating as legal personhood.

AI for now does not have legal personhood, but it is not unlikely that the outcome might ensue, given that AI models would improve in the coming years.

Human Consciousness

“The human mind, distinct from the body, can be conceptually described as the collection of all the electrical and chemical configurators — with their interactions and attributes, in sets, in clusters of neurons — across the central and peripheral nervous systems.

Simply, the human mind is the set[s] of [neuro]configurators. Interactions means the strike of electrical configurators on chemical configurators, in sets. This means that anything that can have an effect on electrical configurators or chemical configurators can influence the mind. So, functions are from interactions. While attributes qualify the functions or determine the limits or extents for those functions.”

Configurators are postulated because signals are said to be more than just for communication between neurons. But configurators, because they mechanize functions, conceptually.

“Human consciousness can be defined, conceptually, as the interaction of the electrical and chemical configurators, in sets—in clusters of neurons—with their features, grading those interactions into functions and experiences.

Simply, for functions to occur, electrical and chemical configurators, in sets, have to interact. However, attributes for those interactions are obtained by the states of electrical and chemical configurators at the time of the interactions.

So, sets of electrical configurators often have momentary states or statuses at which they interact [or strike] at sets of chemical configurators, which also have momentary states or statuses. So, if, for example, in a set, electrical configurators split, with some going ahead, it is in that state that they interact, initially, before the incoming ones follow, which may or may not interact the same way or at the same destination [or set of chemical configurators]. If a set [of chemical configurators] has more volumes of one of the constituents [chemical configurators], more than the others, it is in that state too that they are interacted with.”