Thanks for the comment!

I think you're right that my use of 'provenance' here acts as a proxy - or umbrella - for other analogies. And I think you're also right that those deeper analogies, like the structure or substrate, have the potential to be more predictive than the provenance.

But the reason I say they have 'potential', rather than actualized predictive value, is because, as you mention at the end, we still don't know which of the sub-analogies are relevant, or how their relevance is actually expressed in the witnessed experience of the conciousness they may create.

And so for now, I think we have to rely on broader 'umbrella' analogies, the most comprehensive of which, I think, is the provenance.

Does that make sense?

I don't think provenance will necesarily be the best analogy forever. But I think it is our starting point. And if we want to declare things with a different provenance as sentient, then I think we need to be able to draw a line from ourselves, down through the relevant parts of our structure and substrate, and then back up to the other thing we're declaring as sentient.

But I don't think we're at all in a place to do that yet, and, as yet, still have to rely on provenance, even though it's really just a catch-all analogy for all the things we don't know.

What do you think?