“How do you assign personhood to a creature that might live and die in the span of a single breath?”
—Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
Only the amphibious have souls.
This is not a religious position, no matter of mere faith; it’s just good sense. Only the amphibious lifestyle exposes an organism to distinct, disparate environments, forces them not just to withstand but to inhabit different worlds. This duality profoundly informs physiology and anatomy; those, in turn, profoundly inform the mind and the spirit. Amphibians are always able to see the opposing sides to any story, the different facets of any issue. They can internalize multiple points of view because every moment of their evolution, every cell of their beings has been shaped by the need to reconcile the conflicting demands of different environments.
It is this ability to contain different realities, to balance the tension between opposing forces, that gives rise to complex problem-solving and the ability to see perspectives outside one’s own. These are abilities forever beyond creatures whose minds and bodies are confined to a single environment throughout their lifespan. Oh, such sad creatures might be able to imagine a pale facsimile of multiple perspectives. Obligate land-dwellers might hold their breath and dip their faces into the water, even venture briefly into the depths encased in diving bells and armored suits. “Intelligent” fish might indulge in theoretical “what-if” games, play-act at shams of insight. But such beasts will never feel existential conflicts and resolutions deep in their gut, because their biology has not built them to. They can never be “alive” in the spiritual sense. They are not ensouled.
Occasionally, in the course of their travels, the Late Sleepers have encountered porous creatures with warm blood. These lineages are especially pitiful; beyond the sad limitations of their intellect, their very cellular machinery is defective. Their cell membranes are so leaky, so badly constructed, that they must constantly burn energy just to maintain the same gradients that more efficient histologies accomplish structurally. Their metabolic engines are always running hot and wasteful, so hot the flesh itself is perpetually warm. They burn fuel at an obscene rate. Many of them have to eat every day, just to keep from starving to death!
Monohabs, by definition, cannot be considered “beings”. Porous monohabs? It’s an enduring mystery of biology how such creatures could have ever evolved in the first place.
This is, at least, the view of the Council. No one has disputed it for a billion years.