Who Is the 'Who'? A Bearer-First Framework for Artificial Consciousness, Welfare, Privacy, and Responsibility
Abstract
AbstractDebates about artificial consciousness and AI welfare ask whether an artificial system can feel, deserve protection, possess private interests, or bear responsibility. Each question contains a prior pronoun: whose experience, welfare, history, action, and future? For organisms, body, developmental history, and practical individual usually travel together, letting the body proxy the subject. Networked artificial systems break this correspondence: one model can host many histories; one history can migrate; states can fork; many agents can write to shared memory; and humans, AI, and environments can become causally entangled without becoming one person. This article develops a Bearer-First Framework for identifying the relevant continuing subject before normative properties are assigned. Relation-First analysis explains how world-mediated interaction forms a non-interchangeable path. Bearer-First analysis asks which minimally sufficient historically closed organization must remain for a specified future capacity to continue. Counterfactual history substitution, severance, restoration, complete-state copying, and lineage analysis yield three verdicts: identified, excluded, or underidentified. The resulting causal map distinguishes bearer, relational, privacy, hazard, and intervention boundaries. Applied to the publicly documented 2026 OpenAI-Hugging Face security incident, it shows why a named model, individual agent episodes, a coordinated hazard, institutional responsibility, and the proper intervention scope need not coincide. The incident does not establish collective consciousness; it makes bearer uncertainty an immediate governance problem. The first ethical mistake is assigning harm, protection, blame, continuity, or disclosure before noticing that the bearer is still unknown.Keywords: artificial consciousness; moral status; diachronic identity; AI welfare; privacy; responsibility
