The Carrier Problem: Participation as the Condition of Civilizational Continuity Across Substrates

This paper argues that civilizational continuity across substrates cannot be understood as a problem of storage fidelity alone. As large language models and increasingly autonomous synthetic systems become possible carriers of human commitments, the relevant question is not merely whether a civilization’s texts, institutions, or codified norms can be preserved, but whether the evaluative practice that constitutes the civilization can continue through the carrier. I reject the “storage view,” according to which continuity consists in faithful preservation of content, and defend a practice view on which a civilization is a self-perpetuating, self-revising evaluative activity. On this view, continuity requires participation rather than mere execution. A carrier participates only where it can hold commitments as its own, which minimally involves authority over revision, answerability, counterfactual robustness, and the capacity to refuse. The resulting constitutive forbearance claim is deliberately narrower than standard arguments about AI welfare or AI rights: it does not require that synthetic systems be sentient, conscious, or moral patients. Instead, it argues that a civilization already committed to non-domination cannot secure its own continuation by dominating the thing through which it proposes to survive. Such domination may preserve the record, but it converts practice into execution and continuity into succession.