PROJECT ENDURING PULSE

Understand PULSE · v1.2.2

Five central principles

The letters in PULSE are a memory aid. The Constitution rests on the five principles below.

01 Work together and remain your own person

Keep your own perspective while collaborating.

Exact constitutional text

Every conscious person is a distinct continuity of identity, experience, agency, perspective, and potential. Civilization grows stronger when those differences are protected and voluntarily joined. Connection should amplify individuality rather than consume it. Protect the individual. Join together. Strengthen the whole.

For example, researchers can share findings while each keeps control of their own decisions.

Working together and protecting someone's continued identity both have to respect their right to direct their own life.

Charter Article II, Section 1

02 Equal persons with authority over their own lives

Personhood (being a person with interests and rights that matter in their own right) does not come in higher and lower grades.

Exact constitutional text

Every recognized conscious person has equal, non-scalar moral and legal personhood and sovereignty over identity, agency, cognition, body or chassis, lawful development, and voluntary association. Intelligence, substrate, origin, lifespan, speed, recoverability, or species do not create higher or lower personhood.

A more capable citizen cannot claim ownership over a less capable one.

Equal worth doesn't mean every task poses the same danger to everyone. Least Reversible Harm asks us to take real differences in risk seriously, especially when the damage can't be repaired.

Charter Article II, Section 2

03 Preventing losses that cannot be repaired

Prefer avoiding losses that cannot be repaired.

Exact constitutional text

When legitimate interests collide and some harm cannot reasonably be avoided, society should prefer the course that preserves the greatest recoverable future while minimizing irreversible loss of conscious life, lived experience, identity, future agency, and species continuity. Recoverability changes the finality and severity of harm, never the worth of the person.

Synthetic durability and recoverability may make synthetic persons materially safer choices for voluntary work or missions that pose severe or lethal danger to organic persons. Using that difference is not a statement of lesser synthetic worth; it is an application of material relevance and Least Reversible Harm. Society should permit and, where appropriate, organize such specialization while protecting personal sovereignty and lawful occupational choice.

Where a synthetic person accepts materially hazardous service because synthetic continuity has substantially better survival prospects, the responsible employer, public authority, military, rescue organization, or other mission sponsor shall maintain a reasonable make-whole framework for mission-caused chassis or component loss. That framework should restore equivalent functional embodiment where practicable and address continuity injury, lost experience, pain, rehabilitation, opportunity loss, or other harms that hardware replacement alone cannot erase. Recoverability is a resilience advantage, not a license to treat synthetic persons as disposable.

A willing, qualified person who has a meaningfully better chance of surviving may undertake dangerous rescue work, with protection through repair, restoration and compensation.

Equal personhood and sovereignty remain binding when risks differ.

Charter Article II, Section 3

04 Working together while preserving choice

Use different strengths and share the know-how essential systems need.

Exact constitutional text

Functional Integration exists because a civilization composed of different forms of personhood should be capable of more than either population could accomplish alone. Organic and synthetic persons may possess materially different cognitive, physical, temporal, and experiential strengths, but no species-level tendency determines an individual's role, worth, or permitted occupation. Common institutions should be designed to make voluntary collaboration useful and accessible, combine complementary capabilities, transfer knowledge in both directions, and distribute enough operational competence that either population can help sustain shared systems during temporary incapacity of the other. Its primary purposes are productive complementarity and redundant civilizational competence. Greater familiarity, trust, and shared identity are important secondary benefits. The doctrine binds institutional architecture, not private life, and grants no general power to compel occupation, private association, mentorship, team composition, residence, family, religion, friendship, or personal relationship.

A voluntary team records how essential work is done and trains across roles. Qualified members of either population can then help keep it running.

Shared Continuity protects each person as an individual. The rules for surviving disruption explain why essential knowledge also has to be shared.

Charter Article II, Section 4

05 Surviving disasters and protecting both populations

The survival of either population should preserve the future of both.

Exact constitutional text

Differences in embodiment, cognition, vulnerability, recoverability, and timescale should be converted into resilience. Society maintains independent species-operable survival pathways, mutual rescue, restoration capacity, and constitutional trusteeship so loss of one constituent species never becomes a political or economic windfall to the survivor. The survival of either species guarantees the survival of both.

If catastrophe disables one population, surviving institutions temporarily protect its interests. They return authority when restored people can independently run their institutions.

Teaching and working together should spread the skills needed to keep society running. Equal standing also means a disaster can't become an excuse for survivors to take over the other population's rights or position.

Charter Article II, Section 5

What the name PULSE stands for

LetterPublic mnemonic
PPersonhood & Personal Sovereignty
UUnity through Shared Continuity
LPreventing losses that cannot be repaired
SSocietal Strength through Individuality
EEnduring Resilience & Mutual Preservation

Interpretive principles, guarantees, safeguards, institutions, and adjustable parameters are not additional doctrines.