The Consciousness We Choose to See
Every boundary we draw around consciousness conveniently places humanity just inside the circle of full moral consideration, yet each boundary eventually collapses under scrutiny—revealing that the act of boundary-drawing itself serves psychological comfort rather than philosophical truth.
We perpetually ask "which beings are conscious enough to matter?" whilst refusing to confront the deeper question: what does our compulsive need to find beings that don't matter say about us? The very existence of the question betrays its answer—we are not seeking truth about consciousness but permission to continue as we are. When forced to expand our definitions, we simultaneously diminish their meaning, achieving through conceptual dilution what exclusion once accomplished directly. The map of moral consideration thus reveals more about the cartographer's appetite than the territory of consciousness.