Irreplaceability Without Consciousness: The Master-Copy Criterion for Persons and AI

Can the divide between persons and current AI be settled by a criterion applied from the third person, without peering into anything inner? Three routes—grounding irreplaceability in consciousness, in the scarcity of valued capacities, or in a primitive non-qualitative singularity—yield no such criterion: consciousness cannot be observed, value is not settled, and primitive singularity is either lodged in modal intuition or handed to proxies that both sides satisfy. This paper proposes a negative, structural criterion. An entity is a sole original if and only if it exists in one original instance only, with no master copy outside it from which it could be restored or rolled back. This grounding condition has two observable manifestations: the entity itself is irrecoverably depleted when drawn upon, and it bears non-recoverable costs on its own account. Persons satisfy all three—no master copy; drawn upon, they diminish, and the diminution is not recoverable; costs fall on them, for better or worse. Current AI satisfies none—its weights can be externally set and rolled back, a thousand accesses deplete nothing of it, and the compute consumed is advanced by a third party. The criterion is immune to the truth or falsity of determinism, immune to rises and falls in capability, and material-neutral: it distinguishes not carbon from silicon but substrates that can be losslessly restored from those that cannot. Upon this criterion, the self is the history accumulated upon a sole original out of irreversible resolutions, and a real relationship is the mutual payment of non-recoverable cost between two sole originals. One counterexample falsifies the account: an entity meeting all these structural conditions that can nonetheless be losslessly duplicated.