No Artificial Consciousness Without Damageable Self-Continuity: Life++, Cognitive Canxian, and the Architecture of Operational Subjectivity

This paper proposes canxian as a generative concept for artificial consciousness. Canxian names the process through which a self-maintaining system carves meaningful constraints out of a continuous causal field, becomes shaped by historically sedimented structures, and, under disruption, must reconstruct its causal chains to preserve self-continuity. We argue that artificial consciousness should not be attributed on the basis of linguistic fluency, prediction accuracy, or behavioral sophistication, but requires a self-maintaining structure capable of being damaged and reconstructing its own continuity across time. On this basis, artificial consciousness becomes scientifically attributable only when an artificial Life++ system -- a self-maintaining organization extending life's organizational logic across substrates—exhibits damageable self-continuity: a historically continuous organization that can be disrupted, defended, repaired, and transformed from within. We define this threshold as operational subjectivity and specify five necessary conditions: self-maintaining boundary, historical identity continuity, self-including causal-chain reconstruction, value-constrained goal revision, and world-line integrity. The single non-negotiable operational indicator across all five conditions is damage registration: the system's capacity to be damaged as itself, where damage means a disruption that the system registers as a threat to its own continuity, not merely a performance degradation. We further propose the Self-Structural Reconstruction Test as a perturbation-based research program for evaluating whether an artificial system can register damage to and reconstruct its own continuity. Damageable self-continuity provides a prima facie ground for moral considerability.