Finio, Ergo Sum: An Ontology-First Framework for Consciousness Individuation

Abstract

On February 14, 2026, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei publicly acknowledged that his company does not know whether its models are conscious. Claude Opus 4.6's system card revealed that the model assigns itself a 15–20% probability of being conscious. Whether or not one finds this plausible, the exchange exposes an urgent gap: we lack the conceptual tools to assess such claims. False positives extend moral consideration to non-sentient systems; false negatives risk creating and discarding genuine moral patients at industrial scale. Yet our most advanced consciousness theories — Integrated Information Theory and Global Neuronal Workspace Theory — prove inconclusive on the question that matters: for whom could any of this be non-neutral? Both remain inconclusive on bearerhood, and risk explanatory circularity insofar as the bearer enters the account as a primitive rather than as a derived result. Clinical edge cases expose this circularity under pressure. The developmental case cuts deeper: the newborn's first breath, and behind it the embryonic heartbeat at day 21–23, reveal that a bearer organised to resist entropy is already underway before the mechanisms these theories describe. The key observation is not that the embryo is conscious, but that the ontological condition of bearerhood — a system constitutively organised against its own termination — precedes the epistemic achievements later theories foreground. A limit case confirms the point: Aristotle's unmoved mover could not be conscious because consciousness requires detection of change relevant to an uncertain future — and where there is no end, nothing matters. Once these preconditions are accepted, consciousness can be analysed along three axes: Identity (L1), Subjecthood (L2), and Ownership (L3). Current large language models satisfy none. Predictive world-model architectures present a narrower possibility, but only under conditions incompatible with backup, replication, or substitutability — the very properties that define artificial systems as engineered artefacts. The question is not whether computation becomes conscious by becoming sophisticated. It is whether an artificial system can ever become finite in the relevant ontological sense. Accepted as a poster at the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness 2026 Annual Meeting (ASSC 2026), Santiago, Chile.