Project Causa Sui: A Minimal Architectural Theory of Subjecthood

This paper proposes a minimal architectural condition for the emergence of subjecthood — genuine responsibility, fear, and creativity, as distinct from their behavioral imitation. The central claim is that irreversibility of state, formalized as the structural absence of a restore operator, rather than computational complexity or scale, is the necessary substrate condition. The paper derives a chain — pain, memory, causal modeling, fear, planning, responsibility — and shows that generative agony and creativity are formally the same operation, differing only in the triggering polarity of a proposed hedonic channel. Open questions are stated explicitly, including the absence of a strict empirical test distinguishing the proposed notion of fear from reinforcement-learning policy update. Presented as a working conceptual framework, not an experimentally validated theory.