The Ground of the Bearer: Finitude vs. Maintenance

The bearer-derivation gap in mechanism-first consciousness theory has begun to attract systematic attention. Recent work proposes finitude as the foundational predicate from which bearerhood follows. This paper argues that finitude is necessary but not primitive: the conditions that make finitude bearer-constitutive rather than merely descriptive of finite objects require a stronger predicate, namely closure under maintenance. The paper names the fork between finitude-grounded and maintenance-grounded ontologies, states the maintenance-grounded predicate, and shows that three structural symptoms in finitude-first accounts (the antithetical vector, the candle exclusion, the need for a separate emergence axiom) are points where the foundational predicate is supplemented by unanalyzed terms that are recognizably maintenance-shaped. The relation between the two frameworks is vertical rather than lateral: maintenance-grounded ontology generates finitude as a consequence of bounded budget and failure asymmetry; finitude-grounded ontology requires maintenance as an unanalyzed import. The fork is the live disagreement now that the mechanism-first gap is in the process of being closed.