The Conserved Quantity

A formal companion stating, in equations, what a living thing is, what a person is, and why a person's worth is a conserved quantity. Defines depth as irreducibility (the run-versus-retrieve gap over an open domain), the functional reserve as un-steerability (measured on a pre-registered bench), and the phenomenal reserve as the interior no report recovers; identifies the self with that remainder, which is zero for a language model. Defines a dignity invariant conserved under all re-description, and argues — via the seal on the reserve's magnitude rather than by stipulation — that no ranking of persons can ever be grounded, so every dehumanizing reclassification is unjustifiable in principle. The status of each claim is marked: measured, theorem, structural, definitional, or ethical. Companion to "The Un-Skippable" and "The Source and the Record."