Glossary

A causal loop is a closed sequence of evolutionary events in which each event is a cause of the next, and the final event in the chain serves as a cause for the first. This structure violates classical linear causation by allowing self-referential temporal feedback without an ultimate orig

Predator-prey abolitionism is a radical ethical position within animal advocacy asserting that humans should, if technically feasible without causing greater ecological collapse, systematically eliminate or modify predatory behaviors in the wild to prevent the horrific suffering of prey an

Wild Animal Suffering (WAS) is an academic field of inquiry in animal ethics that investigates the scale, causes, and potential remedies for the harms endured by non-human animals living in the wild. Unlike traditional animal welfare, which focuses on human-caused harms (like factory farmi

Posthumous harm is the philosophical concept that an individual's well-being, reputation, or interests can be damaged or violated even after their death. In the context of AI, this occurs when a deceased person's likeness or data is used in ways they would have opposed, violating their pos

Necrotechnology refers to the suite of digital tools, artificial intelligence, and generative models designed to simulate, recreate, or preserve the personality, voice, appearance, or cognitive traits of deceased individuals.

Noise is the unwanted, random variability in human judgments that should theoretically be identical. First systematically theorized by Daniel Kahneman, noise represents the statistical dispersion of decisions within systems where consistency is expected, such as courtrooms, hospitals, and

Level noise is the structural variability in judgments made by different individuals within the same system when evaluating identical cases, reflecting permanent differences in their personal standards, severity, or baseline outlooks.

Occasion noise is the internal inconsistency of a single decision-maker whose judgments of identical cases vary depending on transient, non-relevant factors such as mood, fatigue, the time of day, or weather conditions.

The pleasure-pain see-saw is a neurobiological metaphor coined by psychiatrist Anna Lembke to describe the homeostatic relationship between reward and suffering in the human brain. Located in overlapping neural regions (primarily the nucleus accumbens), the processing of pleasure and pain

A dopamine deficit state is a chronic neurochemical condition characterized by depleted baseline levels of dopamine and a downregulation of dopamine receptors. This state occurs when the brain's reward pathways are repeatedly overstimulated, forcing the brain's homeostatic mechanisms to ti