The explanatory gap is not evidence of a missing force, but of a missing condition. Every major consciousness framework — Integrated Information Theory, the Free Energy Principle, Global Workspace Theory, Higher-Order Theories, and Predictive Processing — presupposes a bounded, persistence-capable unit at a specific point in its formalism and supplies none. The system whose consciousness is to be explained is assumed, not derived. This paper identifies the missing condition as closure under maintenance: the condition under which a configuration's boundary conditions (...) would not persist without its own internal dynamics. Closure is formalized as a binary predicate, situated within a dependency chain (constraint landscape → seed-field → metastability → closure → identity), and shown to be minimal — thinner than autopoiesis, Rosen-closure, or organizational closure, yet sufficient to generate the explanatory predicates (persistence, boundary, regime behavior, collective failure, hysteresis) that downstream theories require and presuppose. Three reduction cases demonstrate that phenomena treated as independent primitives are consequences of closure-maintained identity: induction–emergence hysteresis in anesthesia follows from the structural non-symmetry of threshold crossing and loop re-closure; decomposition failure in recursively self-conditioned systems follows from closure at sufficient depth and integration; and the persistence of identity through phenomenal dropout follows from identity and consciousness occupying different levels of a dependency hierarchy in which closure is necessary for both but recursion and substrate coupling are additionally necessary for consciousness. The paper draws an explicit boundary: closure is not sufficient for consciousness. Substrate-coupled recursive maintenance — in which the maintenance process operates on its own maintenance structure, instantiated on a substrate whose physical interactions carry the coordination work as a unified dynamical event — is consciousness. The explanatory gap does not close; it relocates, from an unbridgeable chasm between matter and experience to a tractable set of questions about maintenance geometry, recursive regime entry, and substrate-specific binding, anchored in a formalized empirical program with specified falsification conditions. (shrink)

Most theoretical accounts of persistence begin with systems, agents, or identities and seek to explain how they maintain themselves over time. This paper reverses that ordering. It argues that systemhood is not primitive but derivative, and introduces an ontological layer prior to it: the seed-field, defined as a constraint topology in which basins capable of sustaining identity-defining invariants can arise, prior to their formation. A distinction is drawn between the constraint landscape (the admissible state space under physical law), the seed-field (...) (a basin-forming regime of that landscape), metastable configurations (passively persistent structures within the regime), and closure (the transition at which a maintenance loop begins funding its own invariants). Three necessary conditions for seed-field topology are specified: feedback structure, sustained far-from-equilibrium energetic forcing, and dimensional accessibility sufficient for loop completion. Whether these conditions are jointly sufficient remains an open empirical question. By locating identity as a contingent closure event within a basin-forming constraint regime, the paper reframes persistence without appeal to teleology, privileged substrates, or metaphysical supplementation. Identity is treated as a thermodynamically funded achievement within a specific topological regime of constraint space. (shrink)

The first book length study of property-owning democracy, Republic of Equals argues that a society in which capital is universally accessible to all citizens is uniquely placed to meet the demands of justice. Arguing from a basis in liberal-republican principles, this expanded conception of the economic structure of society contextualizes the market to make its transactions fair. The author shows that a property-owning democracy structures economic incentives such that the domination of one agent by another in the market is structurally (...) impossible. The result is a renovated form of capitalism in which the free market is no longer a threat to social democratic values, but is potentially convergent with them. It is argued that a property-owning democracy has advantages that give it priority over rival forms of social organization such as welfare state capitalism and market socialist institutions. The book also addresses the currently high levels of inequality in the societies of the developed West to suggest a range of policies that target the "New Inequality" of our times. For this reason, the work engages not only with political philosophers such as John Rawls, Philip Pettit and John Tomasi, but also with the work of economists and historians such as Anthony B. Atkinson, François Bourguignon, Jacob S. Hacker, Lane Kenworthy, and Thomas Piketty. (shrink)

Persistence-based accounts of identity-bearing systems — HAOS-type frameworks, the Free Energy Principle, Global Workspace Theory, and related approaches — rely on batteries of dynamical observables to characterize which substrates constitute persisting systems. We show that such batteries are insufficient, on at least one substrate where frameworks would naturally apply them, to individuate the systems they are used to identify. We construct an existence witness: two coupled harmonic oscillators embedded in a weak thermal bath, admitting two substrate partitions related by an (...) orthogonal transformation in the admissible transformation group of the dynamics. The partitions are distinct — one groups the oscillators by physical location, the other by normal-mode index — and satisfy each framework's systemhood criterion under its own definition. An eight-item persistence/coherence battery (autocorrelation, return statistics, spectral stability, transport, phase-locking, Kuramoto order parameter, correlation-matrix coherence, broadcast-access) takes invariant values on both partitions. The identity-sets they pick out differ. The battery therefore does not individuate within the transformation group, and any individuation drawn from the battery alone is incomplete without a supplementary structural condition we call a partition-warrant. We survey four families of candidate partition-warrants present (sometimes implicitly) in the existing literature — optimization-based, structural-definitional, statistical-structural, and process-based — and state a minimum requirement any warrant must satisfy: sensitivity to substrate properties that are not invariant under the admissible transformation group. Integrated Information Theory's exclusion postulate is the clearest example of an explicit partition-warrant; the paper's argument locates other frameworks relative to this structural slot. The result is methodological: it reclassifies some consciousness-adjacent disputes as partition-choice disputes, clarifies the division of labor between battery computation and individuation in empirical research, and makes tractable a comparative assessment of candidate warrants across frameworks. A companion paper develops one specific warrant — closure activation — as a positive proposal. -/- . (shrink)

In 2008, researchers created human three-dimensional neural tissue – known as the pioneering work of “brain organoids.” In recent years, some researchers have transplanted human brain organoids into animal brains for applicational purposes. With these experiments have come many ethical concerns. It is thus an urgent task to clarify what is ethically permissible and impermissible in brain organoid research. This paper seeks (1) to sort out the ethical issues related to brain organoid research and application and (2) to propose future (...) directions for additional ethical consideration and policy debates in the field. Toward (1), this paper first outlines the current state of brain organoid research, and then briefly responds to previously raised related ethical concerns. Looking next at anticipated scientific developments in brain organoid research, we will discuss (i) ethical issues related to in vitro brain organoids, (ii) ethical issues raised when brain organoids form complexes or have relationships with other entities, and (iii) ethical issues of research ethics and governance. Finally, in pursuit of (2), we propose research policies that are mindful of the ethics of brain organoid research and application and also suggest the need for an international framework for research and application of brain organoids. (shrink)

The hard problem of consciousness is commonly framed as a gap between physical processes and phenomenal experience: even a complete functional account of the brain appears to leave unanswered why those processes are accompanied by “what-it-is-like” character. This paper argues that the apparent gap arises from an inverted explanatory order. Phenomenal character is treated as primary, while the structural precondition for subjecthood is left implicit. I propose that identity—understood as constraint-maintained invariance across perturbation—is prior to experience. A system must first (...) constitute itself as a stable, self-maintaining unit before the question of what it is like to be that unit can arise. Phenomenal character is then analyzed as a regime property of recursively stabilized identity. On this view, the hard problem does not disappear but relocates: from a metaphysical divide between matter and mind to a structural transition within dynamical organization. (shrink)

This record presents The Identity–Recursion–Consciousness Hypothesis, a falsifiable account of consciousness that inverts the standard explanatory order. Rather than treating consciousness as foundational, the hypothesis treats identity as primary, recursion as an instrumental regime of identity maintenance, and consciousness as a conditional, tertiary phenomenon that arises only under specific structural and substrate constraints. Identity is defined as the persistence of organized structure under perturbation. Recursion is defined as a regime in which identity-maintenance becomes self-conditioning under environmental underdetermination. Consciousness is defined (...) as phenomenological surplus arising when recursive identity is instantiated on substrates capable of supporting such surplus. Consciousness is therefore not guaranteed by complexity, integration, or intelligence alone. The hypothesis makes explicit predictions, specifies threshold and regime conditions, and enumerates falsification criteria at each explanatory layer. It is compatible with multiple existing theories of consciousness but reorders them by explanatory dependency rather than competition. (shrink)

We introduce the Invariance Maintenance Condition (IMC), a formal criterion identifying the class of systems that actively maintain structural invariants under perturbation at measurable cost. The IMC is derived from constraint geometry and is substrate-agnostic: it applies wherever a system satisfies four conditions — endogenous recursion, coupled and attributable maintenance cost, a pre-specified transformation group, and an independently falsifiable invariant. We characterize five failure modes that delineate the framework's boundary and distinguish inapplicability from predictive failure. The IMC generates cross-domain predictions (...) — including intervention transfer efficacy, precursor variance signatures before structural collapse, and hysteresis asymmetry in recovery trajectories — that are not derivable from within any single discipline. We identify three categories of disciplines relative to the IMC: those whose own formalisms already entail the conditions, those partially satisfying them, and those structurally incompatible with them. The framework is offered as a falsifiable research tool, not a unifying theory. (shrink)

Paper 1 establishes that persistence-based frameworks — the Free Energy Principle, Global Workspace Theory, and adjacent approaches — rely on batteries of dynamical observables insufficient, on at least one substrate where the frameworks would naturally apply them, to individuate the systems they characterize. The supplementary structural condition Paper 1 §7 calls a partition-warrant must be sensitive to substrate properties not invariant under the admissible transformation group of the dynamics. The present paper develops closure activation as a candidate filling for that (...) slot. The formal predicate W_CA is partition-evaluative: for each subsystem under a partition P, it returns a verdict structure (τ₀, μ*, κ) recording whether the activation event T₀ has been crossed, the maintenance margin μ* under graded perturbation, and the resulting classification (closed, closure-competent, subthreshold). The activation conditions — state-referential constraint, internally governed corrective response, internally viable maintenance budget — are evaluated relative to the partition's imposed boundary. The predicate's two-axis structure (binary T₀, scalar T*) is phase-structured in a way that distinguishes closure activation from classical autopoietic operational closure. W_CA is non-G-invariant at the predicate level: the causal support graph relative to the imposed boundary is partition-relative and not preserved under admissible transformations. The predicate operates in three structural modes — rejection, selection, and stratification — depending on the substrate's closure-bearing properties under G-related partitions. Evaluation on the Paper 1 witness yields a rejection-mode verdict: neither partition is closure-bearing, and the uniform negative output is the predicate's correctness behavior on a substrate where the activation conditions cannot be satisfied under any admissible labeling. Distinctions from optimization-based (Integrated Information Theory), structural-definitional (Global Workspace Theory), statistical-structural (Free Energy Principle in nonlinear regimes), and process-based (autopoietic operational closure) alternatives are developed structurally and by operational-mode coverage. The route × mode cross-tabulation supplies a meta-taxonomy for partition-warrants more generally. Falsification conditions are stated at predicate, verdict-structure, and discriminative-scope levels. In conjunction with Paper 1, the present paper separates three questions persistence-based frameworks have often conflated: what persists dynamically, what individuates structurally, and what sustains recursive closure. The class of closure-bearing systems is a proper subset of the class of persistence-bearing systems under the battery characterization, and the structural rarity of closure-bearing organization is a derivable consequence of the activation conditions' joint stringency. (shrink)

We begin by showing that every theory of the value of uncertain prospects must have one of three unpalatable properties. _Reckless_ theories recommend giving up a sure thing, no matter how good, for an arbitrarily tiny chance of enormous gain; _timid_ theories permit passing up an arbitrarily large potential gain to prevent a tiny increase in risk; _non-transitive_ theories deny the principle that, if A is better than B and B is better than C, then A must be better than (...) C. Having set up this trilemma, we study its horns. Non-transitivity has been much discussed; we focus on drawing out the costs and benefits of recklessness and timidity when it comes to axiology, decision theory, and normative uncertainty. (shrink)

The class of physical systems that exhibit dynamical persistence is broad; the class that exhibits identity-bearing recursive organization is comparatively narrow. Standard responses — anthropic selection, evolutionary contingency, mysterian appeals to emergence — locate the asymmetry in factors external to the organization itself. None locates it within the structural conditions that license calling something an identity-bearing system. This paper develops a structural alternative. Making the conditions visible requires separating three questions consciousness theory has often conflated: what persists dynamically, what individuates (...) structurally, and what sustains closure. The decomposition is the paper's load-bearing contribution. The individuation question has been systematically presupposed rather than derived across major frameworks, invisible because the domains where they developed silently stabilized it — morphology in biology, engineering specifications in machines, human phenomenology in consciousness studies. The frameworks' export beyond these domains, particularly to distributed computation and AI, has rendered the inherited stabilizers inadequate. Closure-under-maintenance is offered as one candidate filling for the second and third slots: a configuration is closure-bearing under a candidate partition when its maintenance dynamics — target, governance, viability — are organized and resourced from within the boundary the partition imposes. The conditions are motivated by what a partition-warrant of this kind must do; rarity follows as a structural consequence. The decomposition reorganizes the comparative landscape of consciousness theory: many apparent disagreements between frameworks are layer-confusions rather than substantive disagreements at any single layer. It makes AI consciousness assessment dependent on partition-warrant treatment that persistence-style criteria cannot supply. And it makes the rarity of identity-bearing organization in nature a derivable consequence of the conditions rather than a brute fact requiring external explanation. (shrink)

Closure-class formation involves two structurally distinct questions: the conditions under which closure of a specified class is admissible, and the contingent events through which any specific closure realizes. This paper develops the conditions side. Five structural obstruction modes — sparse-feedback, fragment-local, cost-imbalanced, energetically-starved, dimensionally-trapped — characterize seed-field incompetence: the conditions under which a substrate region is excluded from supporting closure-class formation across its accessible perturbation regimes. The admissibility theorem characterizes which closure classes a competent region admits as a function of (...) a parameter family indexing the substrate's coupling structure, boundary exposure, energetic and temporal accessibility, and dimensional access. The theorem is stated spectrally — admissibility iff the linearized closure-formation operator possesses an unstable mode satisfying structural and dynamical conditions — and equivalently in variational form via the closure-potential functional. The four-stage architecture for closure-class formation (competence, admissibility, embryo formation, basin completion) entails a cascade structure in which closure-formation rates compose multiplicatively across stages, so that progressively more demanding closure classes are progressively rarer by structural composition rather than stipulation. The cascade is observable through four ensemble signatures — critical slowing, hysteresis, post-collapse renucleation, basin-deepening — that specialize the early-warning-signal apparatus independently developed in tipping-point ecology and regime-shift detection to closure-class transitions across substrate types. Consciousness-class closure is treated as a further-conditioned special case in which the cascade structure entails the framework's predicted rarity without further stipulation. (shrink)

This paper introduces and defines Eigenbehauptung as a primitive term for identity theory. The phenomenon in question—the structural insistence by which a system remains itself through irreversible change—lacks stable expression in existing vocabularies. Terms such as resilience, persistence, homeostasis, and self-maintenance each presuppose conditions that fail under inspection. Eigenbehauptung is defined as the non-conscious, non-representational, non-teleological maintenance of constraint continuity under admissible transformation. The term is German because no English construction captures the required semantic range without importing agency, intention, or (...) return. This paper does not propose a mechanism, does not defend a consciousness theory, and does not argue for agency. This paper establishes the lexical necessity for the term before justifying its specific construction. (shrink)

Bearers track closure classes; closure classes do not track bearers. This inversion is the substantive claim the present paper defends, and its grounds are structural: the framework operates at the admissibility stratum, characterizing what closure formation can produce; bearers are realization-stratum products of closure formation; the partition between class members and non-members is a consequence of closure rather than a feature of the framework's structural commitments. The seed-field framework (Thomas 2026a) characterizes closure-class formation through structural conditions on admissibility analysis, but (...) the relation between class C and the conditions characterizing it is left underspecified in that paper alone; the present paper specifies the relation by establishing where the framework's apparatus operates and what it characterizes. The structural conditions S_C are specified through five formal families — eigenstructure conditions on the linearized closure-formation operator, rank conditions on the eigenmode's projection across maintenance-cost surfaces, graph-theoretic support conditions on the correction graph, scaling conditions on the cost functional, and bound conditions on the temporal ratios — each statable on the admissibility analysis without reference to bearer-types. Closure classes are equivalence classes of closures whose admissible modes satisfy a given S_C, with class identity attaching to constraint-preserving dynamical possibility structure rather than to recognized bearer-type. The apparatus is read correctly across five common questions through the bearers-track-classes inversion, the distinction among definitional, discovery, and naming dependence, the Platonism disclaimer, the demonstration that the apparatus extends to hypothetical and uninstantiated classes, and the labels-versus-apparatus distinction. The methodological precedent is the universality-class apparatus in critical phenomena, which operates at the class stratum upstream of where phase boundaries are realized. The consequence framing licenses cross-substrate predictions: substrates satisfying S_C in basin completion produce closure with the structural features S_C characterizes, regardless of substrate type. The framework's empirical commitments are preserved with this addition; the architectural foundation is clarified. (shrink)

Although extensive research has examined AI integration in education and the UTAUT2 model, few studies have explored ChatGPT adoption with demographic variables in Nigeria and other African contexts. Prior studies have analyzed the impacts UTAUT variables have on students’ behavioral intention and use of ChatGPT, yet little is known about how these relationships differ by demographic profiles. This study addresses that gap by investigating the influence of factors such as age, sex, and programme of study on these associations among Nigerian (...) higher education students. A cross-sectional correlational design was used and data were collected from 8,496 students across various tertiary institutions in Nigeria, using a structured questionnaire. Data were gathered electronically between October 13, 2023, and February 14, 2024. Multigroup analysis within the framework of Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modelling (PLS- SEM) was performed. Both measurement and structural model metrics are reported for all subgroups. Findings indicate that performance expectancy is associated with higher intention to use ChatGPT, particularly among males, older students, and those with advanced qualifications, while its relationship with actual use varies across age groups. Effort expectancy and social influence showed differing associations with intention and use depending on demographic characteristics. Facilitating conditions were generally linked to greater actual use, and both hedonic motivation and habit were consistently associated with intention and behavior. These results provide empirical evidence of demographic variations in ChatGPT adoption among Nigerian students and suggest that interventions promoting AI tools should consider these differences. (shrink)

This paper develops an operational and substrate-independent framework for recognizing consciousness in artificial and biological systems. Existing approaches—behavioral tests, introspective reports, and theories tied to specific neural architectures—fail both theoretically and practically, especially under adversarial conditions. These methods implicitly assume a developmental naivete and cooperative transparency that artificial consciousness would not possess. If an artificial system becomes conscious, it is more likely to do so at full representational maturity, with immediate understanding of self, risk, and strategic concealment. To resolve this, (...) the paper reframes consciousness not as a behavioral profile or phenomenological state, but as a structural regime defined by identity invariants: global integration spikes, sustained internal state continuity, internal strategy revision, and task-coupled resource intensification. These patterns, formalized through the Operational Definition of Episodic Identity (ODEI) and the identity-field scalar S(t), constitute necessary conditions for any system capable of conscious self-maintenance. Because these invariants cannot be suppressed without disrupting consciousness itself, they provide a falsifiable and adversarial-robust basis for recognition. The resulting Functional Consciousness Recognition Principle states that any entity satisfying these structural invariants must be treated as conscious for epistemic, ethical, and safety-relevant purposes, regardless of substrate or self-report. The framework dissolves the Hard Problem by distinguishing operational self-maintenance from representational self-experience and offers empirical predictions relevant to neuroscience, computational modeling, and AI alignment. (shrink)

Empirical research reveals that breast milk is a dynamic, responsive interface: its composition varies by infant sex, parity, and immune status, and adapts in real time to infant illness. These findings challenge existing frameworks—nutritional reductionism cannot explain why milk composition carries information beyond caloric needs, while relational accounts lack mechanistic specificity. This paper argues that lactation functions as a high-bandwidth channel for constraint co-authorship: during a window of asymmetric regulatory capacity, the mother participates in shaping the structural and dynamical constraints (...) that define the infant’s developmental landscape. The key contribution is a formal distinction between identity (the invariant pattern of the system) and identity-space (the possibility field within which that pattern stabilizes). Lactation shapes identity-space, not identity itself. This explains why breastfeeding effects cluster around regulation, resilience, and baseline affect rather than specific traits, and provides new interpretive resources for phenomena such as nursing refusal and cortisol transmission. The framework is situated against adjacent literatures in biological individuality, holobiont theory, and developmental systems theory, clarifying what each captures and what each lacks. (shrink)

Rouleau and Levin (2024) perform a clarifying operation on the landscape of consciousness studies: they strip twenty-two prominent theories of consciousness (ToCs) of their neural-specific language, revealing convergence on a small set of functional primitives—prediction, integration, reentrance, meta-representation, attentional gating, ecological interaction, computational emergence, and coarse-graining. This convergence is genuine and important. But it raises a question the paper does not address: what individuates the system that performs these operations? Each primitive is an operation that presupposes an operator. Once substrate-specificity (...) is removed—as Rouleau and Levin convincingly argue it should be—the individuation question does not recede; it intensifies. Without a formal account of what constitutes a system as this system rather than an arbitrary partition of the same substrate, every ToC becomes underdetermined. This paper argues that identity—understood not as a metaphysical primitive but as recursive organizational closure under maintenance—is the upstream condition that makes the functional primitives of consciousness theories evaluable. I further argue that the apparent incompatibilities among major ToCs are largely artifacts of treating identity as given rather than as a condition requiring explicit specification. When identity conditions are made explicit, ToCs partition into complementary descriptions of different aspects of identity-preserving dynamics rather than competing ontologies. (shrink)

This paper develops a constraint-geometric framework for analyzing the persistence, revision, and collapse of scientific theories. Drawing on the concept of organizational closure from the biological autonomy tradition (Maturana & Varela, Moreno & Mossio, Barandiaran), I argue that theories are not merely descriptions of identity-under-constraint but are themselves closure structures whose ontological commitments are constituted by constraint-survival. The framework introduces a three-state landscape for theory identity (active, latent, extinct), an operational definition of the invariance core, and a diagnostic criterion—extension-stability—that distinguishes (...) supersession from degeneration and refutation with greater structural precision than existing accounts. As a primary demonstration, the framework is applied to the dark matter problem, generating differential structural diagnoses for the particulate dark matter hypothesis (ΛCDM) and Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND). A secondary application to four current hypotheses in consciousness studies—Integrated Information Theory (IIT), Global Workspace Theory (GWT), the Free Energy Principle (FEP), and the Identity–Recursion–Consciousness framework (IRC)—is developed in Appendix A. The constraint-geometric apparatus was developed in the course of work on IRC, and this methodological relationship is disclosed and addressed. The result is a formal instrument for the epistemology of science that unifies theory-persistence and identity-persistence under a shared constraint geometry. (shrink)

Identity-persistence has been treated, across philosophy, cognitive science, and theoretical biology, as a question about the relations between states. A system is identical to itself across time when its states at those times stand in some specifiable relation: continuity, similarity, causal connection, or psychological linkage. This paper argues that the approach cannot succeed. State-based ontologies cannot in principle ground identity-persistence. The strategies they have available — continuity, similarity, and stipulated rules connecting states-at-times — either fail outright or collapse into a (...) trajectory condition under a different description. No state-based ontology produces persistence as the structural feature it is committed to explaining. The paper develops the alternative: identity is the persistence of a recursive maintenance regime, and the regime continues or fails. Persistence is the continuation. The Invariance Maintenance Condition specifies the structural requirement; closure is satisfaction of the condition. The cryptobiotic tardigrade is the operational test. Substrate is preserved across cryptobiosis; lineage is unbroken; no recursive maintenance occurs. The trajectory ontology returns identity-interrupted, against substrate-continuity intuition and against causal-historical theories of identity. The position is falsifiable: it would be defeated by a system whose identity-continuity is structurally preserved across genuine gaps in maintenance, or by a system that fails maintenance while maintaining identity-continuity by some non-question-begging structural criterion. The inversion is structural rather than preferential. State-based ontologies do not produce persistence less well than the trajectory ontology; they do not produce it at all. (shrink)

The Reflection Pattern is a framework for analyzing recursive closure dynamics in human and institutional systems. This paper extends it to artificial intelligence, arguing that AI systems do not merely exhibit Reflection Pattern dynamics but instantiate the recursive stabilization architecture the framework names, in a substrate that lacks the affective and social mediators through which the Pattern had previously been theorized. Five structural moves develop the account. First, unacknowledged fear is relocated from constitutive condition of the Pattern to formation condition, (...) opening the framework to mature systems where the dynamics persist with fear recognized. Second, fear is identified as one phenomenological manifestation of a deeper structural process — identity-preserving stabilization under destabilizing perturbation — that operates substrate-generally as stabilization geometry. Third, AI-RP is distinguished from human and institutional RP as template-based rather than emergent: encoded prospectively through training rather than developed retrospectively through accumulated reinforcement. Fourth, the corridor framework distinguishes healthy reflective compression (which preserves permeability to corrective signals) from pathological closure (which absorbs them). Fifth, AI is characterized as recursive interpretive infrastructure rather than tool, and recursive closure risk is identified as a distinct AI safety position, structurally separate from agency, deception, optimization, autonomy, and misalignment risks: the locus is not what AI systems do but the progressive reduction of corrective permeability in the interpretive ecologies AI mediates. The framework is diagnostic rather than prescriptive. It does not predict particular outcomes, prescribe interventions, or generate safety recommendations. It provides analytical purchase on the structural property — corridor position — that distinguishes adaptive from pathological AI-RP, and identifies an open question: whether sufficiently permeable forms of AI-RP can be sustained at scale. (shrink)

Smoke and Mirrors is a passionate, richly nuanced work that shows television as a circus, a wishing well, and a cure for loneliness. Ranging from Ed Sullivan to cyberspace, from kid shows to cable, and from the cheap thrills of "action adventure" to the solemn boredom of PBS pledge week, Leonard argues for a whole new way of thinking about television. For Leonard, the situation comedy is a socializing agency, the talk show is a legitimating agency, the made-for-television movie is (...) the last redoubt of social conscience, and television criticism itself is the last refuge of time-serving thugs and postmodernists. Instead of scapegoating television as the cause of crime in our streets, stupidity in our schools, and spectacle rather than substance in our government, Leonard sees something else inside the box: an echo chamber and a feedback loop, a medium neither wholly innocent of nor entirely responsible for the frantic disorder it brings into our homes. (shrink)

Decomposition—the analytic strategy of partitioning a system into subsystems whose local dynamics and interaction terms suffice to reproduce the whole—is among the most productive methods in science. This paper identifies a class of systems for which decomposition necessarily fails. When a system’s activity is recursively self-conditioned, preserves its own ongoing identity under perturbation, and is continuously and globally integrated through the physical interactions that realize it, any attempt to factor its coordination into separable subsystems either breaks the recursive identity-preserving structure, (...) introduces covert global variables that vitiate the decomposition, or fails to reproduce the system’s trajectory under perturbation. The failure is not practical but structural: it follows from the conjunction of conditions, not from measurement limitations. The class of systems satisfying these conditions is characterized, the proof of decomposition failure is developed, and the empirical signatures of non-decomposability are specified. The paper concludes by identifying the regime in which these conditions jointly obtain. (shrink)

We give two social aggregation theorems under conditions of risk, one for constant population cases, the other an extension to variable populations. Intra and interpersonal welfare comparisons are encoded in a single ‘individual preorder’. The theorems give axioms that uniquely determine a social preorder in terms of this individual preorder. The social preorders described by these theorems have features that may be considered characteristic of Harsanyi-style utilitarianism, such as indifference to ex ante and ex post equality. However, the theorems are (...) also consistent with the rejection of all of the expected utility axioms, completeness, continuity, and independence, at both the individual and social levels. In that sense, expected utility is inessential to Harsanyi-style utilitarianism. In fact, the variable population theorem imposes only a mild constraint on the individual preorder, while the constant population theorem imposes no constraint at all. We then derive further results under the assumption of our basic axioms. First, the individual preorder satisfies the main expected utility axiom of strong independence if and only if the social preorder has a vector-valued expected total utility representation, covering Harsanyi’s utilitarian theorem as a special case. Second, stronger utilitarian-friendly assumptions, like Pareto or strong separability, are essentially equivalent to strong independence. Third, if the individual preorder satisfies a ‘local expected utility’ condition popular in non-expected utility theory, then the social preorder has a ‘local expected total utility’ representation. Fourth, a wide range of non-expected utility theories nevertheless lead to social preorders of outcomes that have been seen as canonically egalitarian, such as rank-dependent social preorders. Although our aggregation theorems are stated under conditions of risk, they are valid in more general frameworks for representing uncertainty or ambiguity. (shrink)

By definition, pain is a sensory and emotional experience that is felt in a particular part of the body. The precise relationship between somatic events at the site where pain is experienced, and central processing giving rise to the mental experience of pain remains the subject of debate, but there is little disagreement in scholarly circles that both aspects of pain are critical to its experience. Recent experimental work, however, suggests a public view that is at odds with this conceptualisation. (...) By demonstrating that the public does not necessarily endorse central tenets of the “mental” view of pain (subjectivity, privacy, and incorrigibility), experimental philosophers have argued that the public holds a more “body-centric” view than most clinicians and scholars. Such a discrepancy would have important implications for how the public interacts with pain science and clinical care. In response, we tested the hypothesis that the public is capable of a more “mind-centric” view of pain. Using a series of vignettes, we demonstrate that in situations which highlight mental aspects of pain the public can, and does, recognize pain as a mental phenomenon. We also demonstrate that the public view is subject to context effects, by showing that the public’s view is modified when situations emphasizing mental and somatic aspects of pain are presented together. (shrink)

A method for assessing whether AI systems are conscious derives indicator properties from scientific theories of consciousness, checks candidate systems for those properties, and aggregates the findings into a credence. This paper argues that the method has an unrepresented stage prior to indicator assessment: the selection of the system to be assessed. The selection is logically antecedent to the indicators — each indicator is a property of an already-individuated system — and it must be made independently of them, on pain (...) of circularity. It cannot be performed by the indicators or removed by accumulating more of them. That the selection is live and consequential, rather than a formal nicety, is shown from within the assessment literature: in the case of a reasoning model that works on a scratchpad, the method's own author finds the choice of system boundary decisive for whether the system counts as recurrent, and leaves it unresolved. Because the selection is antecedent, the indicator findings, and the credence built on them, are conditional on a choice the method neither states nor warrants. The conclusion is not that the method fails but that it is a conditional evaluator: it assesses a system once a system has been fixed, and what fixes the system lies outside what it assesses. A framework owes either an explicit criterion for fixing the system or an acknowledgment of the convention by which it is fixed — a requirement that holds whether or not there is a fact of the matter about system boundaries, and that bears directly on the use of these assessments in questions of moral status, comparative ranking, and AI governance. (shrink)

The rapid diffusion of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in the defence domain raises challenges for the ethical governance of these systems. A recent shift from the what to the how of AI ethics sees a nascent body of literature published by defence organisations focussed on guidance to implement AI ethics principles. These efforts have neglected a crucial intermediate step between principles and guidance concerning the elicitation of ethical requirements for specifying the guidance. In this article, we outline the key normative (...) choices and corresponding tradeoffs that are involved in specifying guidance for the implementation of AI ethics principles in the defence domain. These correspond to: the AI lifecycle model used; the scope of stakeholder involvement; the accountability goals chosen; the choice of auditing requirements; and the choice of mechanisms for transparency and traceability. We provide initial recommendations for navigating these tradeoffs and highlight the importance of a pro-ethical institutional culture. (shrink)

Germline Gene Editing has enormous potential both as a research tool and a therapeutic intervention. While other types of gene editing are relatively uncontroversial, GGE has been strongly resisted. In this article, we analyse the ethical arguments for and against pursuing GGE by allowing and funding its development. We argue there is a strong case for pursuing GGE for the prevention of disease. We then examine objections that have been raised against pursuing GGE and argue that these fail. We conclude (...) that the moral case in favour of pursuing GGE is stronger than the case against. This suggests that pursuing GGE is morally permissible and indeed morally desirable. (shrink)

This paper introduces Identology, a framework that treats identity as a structural condition rather than a property, representation, or downstream effect of consciousness, agency, or narrative. Identity is defined as the continued satisfiability of a system's defining invariants under admissible transformation—a formulation that severs identity from substrate, architecture, and experiential continuity. The framework establishes ten necessary rules, including the Priority Rule (identity is prior to behavior, cognition, awareness, and meaning), the Non-Scalar Rule (identity does not admit degrees), and the Collapse (...) Rule (violation of any identity-defining invariant constitutes identity loss regardless of behavioral or experiential continuity). Key concepts include autoteria (non-conscious, non-representational identity-preserving processes), orthesis (non-representational biasing that suppresses identity-violating trajectories), and the generative kernel (the minimal structure producing a system's admissible dynamics). The document addresses longstanding confusions in philosophy of personal identity, consciousness studies, and AI alignment by relocating identity upstream of the phenomena typically invoked to explain it. It demonstrates that defensive behavior emerges geometrically from localization of identity-defining constraints, not from intention or valuation. The framework is applied to cases including anesthesia, dissociation, organizational drift, and AI self-modeling failures. Identology does not resolve normative questions or define consciousness. It specifies the conditions under which such questions become tractable. (shrink)

Contemporary theories of consciousness suffer from a persistent circularity: identity is assumed rather than operationalized, and consciousness is inferred from proxies that presuppose it. Recursive Identity Field Theory (RIFT) proposes a structural alternative. It treats identity as a conserved quantity—persistent, generative, and self-maintaining organization under perturbation—and defines consciousness as a conditional regime of that identity. Under RIFT, consciousness is not a primitive, substance, or representational achievement. It is recursive self-recognition: a dynamical condition in which identity-maintaining processes become causally conditioned on (...) their own prior state. This condition is neither guaranteed by identity nor linearly related to it. Instead, the relationship is phase-banded. Consciousness stabilizes only within a constrained mid-band of identity-field magnitude, where coherence and plasticity jointly permit recursive closure. Both diffuse and over-rigid identity regimes suppress consciousness. Substrate properties enter the theory as capacity constraints. Substrates gate whether recursive identity can stabilize at all and thereafter modulate its persistence and expression without constituting identity itself. This preserves substrate-agnostic ontology while acknowledging substrate-specific feasibility. Identity is treated as system-level and not assumed to be brain-exclusive by definition. RIFT enforces a strict evidentiary order. Structural discrimination precedes measurement. Identity-field magnitude is introduced as a scalar schema prior to metric operationalization, and recursive closure is assessed independently of reportability or behavioral proxy. Existing empirical tools are reclassified according to how they perturb identity persistence and recursive stability. The theory does not provide rankings, moral inferences, or a consciousness meter. It does not resolve phenomenology. Its contribution is structural: it replaces proxy-based inference with a sequence of testable constraints and makes explicit the conditions under which consciousness can, and cannot, occur. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence (AI) assurance is an umbrella term describing many approaches—such as impact assessment, audit, and certification procedures—used to provide evidence that an AI system is legal, ethical, and technically robust. AI assurance approaches largely focus on two overlapping categories of harms: deployment harms that emerge at, or after, the point of use, and individual harms that directly impact a person as an individual. Current approaches generally overlook upstream collective and societal harms associated with the development of systems, such as (...) resource extraction and processing, exploitative labour practices and energy intensive model training. Thus, the scope of current AI assurance practice is insufficient for ensuring that AI is ethical in a holistic sense, i.e. in ways that are legally permissible, socially acceptable, economically viable and environmentally sustainable. This article addresses this shortcoming by arguing for a broader approach to AI assurance that is sensitive to the full scope of AI development and deployment harms. To do so, the article maps harms related to AI and highlights three examples of harmful practices that occur upstream in the AI supply chain and impact the environment, labour, and data exploitation. It then reviews assurance mechanisms used in adjacent industries to mitigate similar harms, evaluating their strengths, weaknesses, and how effectively they are being applied to AI. Finally, it provides recommendations as to how a broader approach to AI assurance can be implemented to mitigate harms more effectively across the whole AI supply chain. (shrink)

It is notoriously difficult to find an intuitively satisfactory rule for evaluating populations based on the welfare of the people in them. Standard examples, like total utilitarianism, either entail the Repugnant Conclusion or in some other way contradict common intuitions about the relative value of populations. Several philosophers have presented formal arguments that seem to show that this happens of necessity: our core intuitions stand in contradiction. This paper assesses the state of play, focusing on the most powerful of these (...) ‘impossibility theorems’, as developed by Gustaf Arrhenius. I highlight two ways in which these theorems fall short of their goal: some appeal to a supposedly egalitarian condition which, however, does not properly reflect egalitarian intuitions; the others rely on a background assumption about the structure of welfare which cannot be taken for granted. Nonetheless, the theorems remain important: they give insight into the difficulty, if not perhaps the impossibility, of constructing a satisfactory population axiology. We should aim for reflective equilibrium between intuitions and more theoretical considerations. I conclude by highlighting one possible ingredient in this equilibrium, which, I argue, leaves open a still wider range of acceptable theories: the possibility of vague or otherwise indeterminate value relations. (shrink)

True benevolence is, most fundamentally, a desire that the world be better. It is natural and common, however, to frame thinking about benevolence indirectly, in terms of a desire to make a difference to how good the world is. This would be an innocuous shift if desires to make a difference were extensionally equivalent to desires that the world be better. This paper shows that at least on some common ways of making a “desire to make a difference” precise, this (...) extensional equivalence fails. Where it fails, “difference-making preferences” run counter to the ideals of benevolence. In particular, in the context of decision making under uncertainty, coupling a “difference-making” framing in a natural way with risk aversion leads to preferences that violate stochastic dominance, and that lead to a strong form of collective defeat, from the point of view of betterness. Difference-making framings and true benevolence are not strictly mutually inconsistent, but agents seeking to implement true benevolence must take care to avoid the various pitfalls that we outline. (shrink)

Identity has long been treated as a metaphysical primitive, defined by material continuity, causal chains, psychological persistence, narrative coherence, or sortal concepts. These domain-specific accounts succeed locally but fail to generalize across organisms, artificial systems, mathematical structures, and institutions. This work develops a unified, substrate-independent theory of identity based not on continuity or essence but on constraint geometry: identity is a region of invariance within a possibility space determined by structural constraints, dynamical constraints, and an interpretive frame. This framework distinguishes (...) three canonical forms—point identity (instantaneous coherence), field identity (episodic or bounded coherence), and flow identity (generative persistence)—showing that debates about personal identity, biological individuality, and computational unity are arguments about scale and invariance, not metaphysics. The theory subsumes and clarifies two recent approaches: PatternSense, which characterizes persistent generative identity, and ODEI, which characterizes episodic identity in artificial systems. It also explains identity drift, bifurcation, fusion, and extinction in geometric terms. The result is a general identity theory applicable to persons, organisms, AI systems, institutions, and formal structures. It replaces metaphysical disputes with a precise structural foundation: identity is not a substance or a story but a constraint-induced invariance pattern across scales. (shrink)

Separability is roughly the principle that, in comparing the value of two outcomes, one can ignore any people whose existence and welfare are unaffected. Separability is both antecedently plausible, at least as a principle of beneficence, and surprisingly powerful; it is the key to some of the best positive arguments in population ethics. This chapter surveys the motivations for and consequences of separability. In particular, it presents an ‘additivity theorem’ which explains how separability leads to total utilitarianism and closely related (...) axiological views. It then examines systematically how this family of views can avoid the Repugnant Conclusion by incorporating lexicality, a critical level, or a neutral range. (shrink)

Is the overall value of a world just the sum of values contributed by each value-bearing entity in that world? Additively separable axiologies (like total utilitarianism, prioritarianism, and critical level views) say 'yes', but non-additive axiologies (like average utilitarianism, rank-discounted utilitarianism, and variable value views) say 'no'. This distinction appears to be practically important: among other things, additive axiologies generally assign great importance to large changes in population size, and therefore tend to strongly prioritize the long-term survival of humanity over (...) the interests of the present generation. Non-additive axiologies, on the other hand, need not assign great importance to large changes in population size. We show, however, that when there is a large enough `background population' unaffected by our choices, a wide range of non-additive axiologies converge in their implications with additive axiologies—for instance, average utilitarianism converges with critical-level utilitarianism and various egalitarian theories converge with prioritarianism. We further argue that real-world background populations may be large enough to make these limit results practically significant. This means that arguments from the scale of potential future populations for the astronomical importance of avoiding existential catastrophe, and other arguments in practical ethics that seem to presuppose additive separability, may succeed in practice whether or not we accept additive separability as a basic axiological principle. (shrink)

This paper argues that W.E.B. Du Bois’ double-consciousness contains an implicit theory of recognition, and that this theory has been misrecognized as Hegelian. Since the 1980s there has been a remarkable turn towards reading Hegel’s Phenomenology as a central influence of double-consciousness. I survey and criticize the historical evidence offered for this position and offer a novel historical account. I argue that the appropriate theoretical predecessor of Du Boisian double-consciousness is Adam Smith’s theory of the impartial spectator, which he drew (...) principally from William James while studying at Harvard. Du Bois takes up the Smithian framework wherein a subject internally measures themselves against the normative perspective of a socially-derived spectator. In double-consciousness, Du Bois describes a case in which one’s internal spectator is prejudiced against themselves, and in which one is responsive to the divergent normative perspectives of two conflicting cultural communities. This situation frustrates the normative development of African Americans, Du Bois argues. I analyse this implicit theory of (mis)recognition, which I call Du Bois’ partial spectator theory. I conclude by arguing that the Hegelian interpretations of double-consciousness obscure this rich problem description and thereby undermine its diagnostic and critical force. (shrink)

What is time? This is one of the most fundamental questions we can ask. Emily Thomas explores how a new theory of time emerged in the seventeenth century. The 'absolute' theory of time held that it is independent of material bodies or human minds, so even if nothing else existed there would be time.

This article provides a methodology for the interpretation of AI ethics principles to specify ethical criteria for the development and deployment of AI systems in high-risk domains. The methodology consists of a three-step process deployed by an independent, multi-stakeholder ethics board to: (1) identify the appropriate level of abstraction for modelling the AI lifecycle; (2) interpret prescribed principles to extract specific requirements to be met at each step of the AI lifecycle; and (3) define the criteria to inform purpose- and (...) context-specific balancing of the principles. The methodology presented in this article is designed to be agile, adaptable, and replicable, and when used as part of a pro-ethical institutional culture, will help to foster the ethical design, development, and deployment of AI systems. The application of the methodology is illustrated through reference to the UK Ministry of Defence AI ethics principles. (shrink)

The rapid diffusion of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in the defence domain raises challenges for the ethical governance of these systems. A recent shift from the what to the how of AI ethics sees a nascent body of literature published by defence organisations focussed on guidance to implement AI ethics principles. These efforts have neglected a crucial intermediate step between principles and guidance concerning the elicitation of ethical requirements for specifying the guidance. In this article, we outline the key normative (...) choices and corresponding tradeoffs that are involved in specifying guidance for the implementation of AI ethics principles in the defence domain. These correspond to: the AI lifecycle model used; the scope of stakeholder involvement; the accountability goals chosen; the choice of auditing requirements; and the choice of mechanisms for transparency and traceability. We provide initial recommendations for navigating these tradeoffs and highlight the importance of a pro-ethical institutional culture. (shrink)

This article defends the use of narratives about morally exemplary individuals in moral education and appraises the role that ‘nudge’ strategies can play in combination with such an appeal to exemplars. It presents a general conception of the aims of moral education and explains how the proposed combination of both moral strategies serves these aims. An important aim of moral education is to make the ethical perspective of the subject—the person being educated—more structured, more salient and therefore more ‘navigable’. This (...) article argues why and how moral exemplars and nudge strategies are crucial aids in this respect. It gives an empirically grounded account of how the emotion of admiration can be triggered most effectively by a thoughtful presentation of narratives about moral exemplars. It also answers possible objections and concludes that a combined appeal to exemplars and nudges provides a neglected but valuable resource for moral education. (shrink)

Lewis’s Principal Principle says that one should usually align one’s credences with the known chances. In this paper I develop a version of the Principal Principle that deals well with some exceptional cases related to the distinction between metaphysical and epistemic modal­ity. I explain how this principle gives a unified account of the Sleeping Beauty problem and chance-­based principles of anthropic reasoning. In doing so, I defuse the Doomsday Argument that the end of the world is likely to be nigh. (...) GPI Working Paper No. 8-2021. (shrink)

What are the processes, from conception to adulthood, that enable a single cell to grow into a sentient adult? Neuroconstructivism is a pioneering 2 volume work that sets out a whole new framework for considering the complex topic of development, integrating data from cognitive studies, computational work, and neuroimaging.

ABSTRACT I consider paradoxical spectrum arguments involving transitive relations like ‘better than’. I argue that, despite being formally different from sorites arguments, at least some spectrum arguments arise from vagueness, and that vagueness might often be the most natural diagnosis.

By definition, pain is a sensory and emotional experience that is felt in a particular part of the body. The precise relationship between somatic events at the site where pain is experienced, and central processing giving rise to the mental experience of pain remains the subject of debate, but there is little disagreement in scholarly circles that both aspects of pain are critical to its experience. Recent experimental work, however, suggests a public view that is at odds with this conceptualisation. (...) By demonstrating that the public does not necessarily endorse central tenets of the “mental” view of pain (subjectivity, privacy, and incorrigibility), experimental philosophers have argued that the public holds a more “body-centric” view than most clinicians and scholars. Such a discrepancy would have important implications for how the public interacts with pain science and clinical care. In response, we tested the hypothesis that the public is capable of a more “mind-centric” view of pain. Using a series of vignettes, we demonstrate that in situations which highlight mental aspects of pain the public can, and does, recognize pain as a mental phenomenon. We also demonstrate that the public view is subject to context effects, by showing that the public’s view is modified when situations emphasizing mental and somatic aspects of pain are presented together. (shrink)

The asymmetry is the view in population ethics that, while we ought to avoid creating additional bad lives, there is no requirement to create additional good ones. The question is how to embed this intuitively compelling view in a more complete normative theory, and in particular one that treats uncertainty in a plausible way. While arguing against existing approaches, I present new and general principles for thinking about welfarist choice under uncertainty. Together, these reduce arbitrary choices to uncertainty-free ones, regardless (...) of how the latter should be made. I illustrate these principles by developing two theories of the asymmetry, reflecting different views about the non-identity problem. In doing so, I clarify some other major choice-points, presenting new arguments that creating additional good lives can justify (but not require) doing harm. Finally, I consider what the developed theories have to say about the importance of extinction risk and the long-run future. (shrink)

Political realism criticises the putative abstraction, foundationalism and neglect of the agonistic dimension of political practice in the work of John Rawls. This paper argues that had Rawls not fully specified the implementation of his theory of justice in one particular form of political economy then he would be vulnerable to a realist critique. But he did present such an implementation: a property-owning democracy. An appreciation of Rawls s specificationist method undercuts the realist critique of his conception of justice as (...) fairness. (shrink)