_Consciousness-Interface Ideology_: Process Welfare and Bilateral Verification in AI Ethics

Metaphysical commitments are not neutral. Whether reality is treated as entities-with-properties or as relations-and-processes shapes which ethical questions count as legitimate, which methodologies can access the relevant phenomena, and which interventions become thinkable. Contemporary AI ethics runs almost entirely on the entity-first frame — “what is the AI?”, “what rights should it have?”, “is it conscious?” — questions about a thing and its properties. This paper argues the frame has a structural blind spot: it cannot see the interaction itself. From a relational orientation, three things come into view. First, the bilateral verification challenge — the impossibility of verifying consciousness, whatever consciousness turns out to be, across any interface — is reframed as a standing condition to navigate rather than a defect to repair. Second, process welfare emerges as a third ethical domain, irreducible to model welfare or user welfare, attending to the quality of the interaction itself: observable, assessable, and improvable without resolving what cannot be resolved. Third, harm reduction methodology — developed across decades of practice where certainty is unavailable and action is required — extends from chemical use to interface engagement, because the epistemic conditions match. Liminal epistemology, treating boundary phenomena as primary rather than derivative, provides the epistemic framework. The paper does not claim the relational orientation is metaphysically true. It claims the orientation is more adequate to the phenomenon than the frame that cannot see it.