Bearer Theory — Papers
Preprints from the Bearer Theory / Life Before Language research program.
Author: Alex Bone, Independent Researcher, Long Beach, CA (ORCID 0009-0003-4252-7556) License: CC BY 4.0
Papers
When Identity Is Load-Bearing: A Proposed Design Law for Incorporated Developmental State
When does an incorporated developmental state (a "bearer" that both biases behavior and is updated by that behavior's own outcomes) do causal work rather than sit idle? The paper proposes a design law with three regimes and demonstrates it across three substrates that share nothing but the loop: an RL forager, a transformer with a fast-weight memory, and a competitive-fatigue dynamical system. A self versus wrong-bearer gap of 0.51 establishes load-bearing non-transferability where the escape is foreclosed and the bearer is adaptive.
Life Before Language: Separating the Engineering Gap from the Metaphysical Gap in Debates on Machine Consciousness
Formalizes a seven-level hierarchy of the pre-linguistic developmental interface, distinguishes an engineering gap from a metaphysical gap, and executes a research program with four probe systems and a construction-order experiment. Constraints present from the first training step are internalized; inference-only overlays are a tax and retrofits a crutch. The experiments locate the wall; they do not dissolve it.
Links
- Live demo (the bearer mechanism): https://huggingface.co/spaces/Vikingdude81/bearer-theory-demo
- Papers repo + releases: https://github.com/vikingdude81/bearer-theory
- Constitutive GPT code: https://github.com/vikingdude81/constitutive-gpt
- Gabriel's Horn: https://github.com/vikingdude81/gabriels-horn
Citation
Both papers are archived on Zenodo (CC BY 4.0):
- When Identity Is Load-Bearing: 10.5281/zenodo.22761148
- Life Before Language: 10.5281/zenodo.22761207
@techreport{bone2026loadbearing,
author = {Bone, Alex},
title = {When Identity Is Load-Bearing: A Proposed Design Law for Incorporated Developmental State},
year = {2026}, type = {Preprint}, institution = {Independent Researcher},
doi = {10.5281/zenodo.22761148}
}
@techreport{bone2026lifebeforelanguage,
author = {Bone, Alex},
title = {Life Before Language: Separating the Engineering Gap from the Metaphysical Gap in Debates on Machine Consciousness},
year = {2026}, type = {Preprint}, institution = {Independent Researcher},
doi = {10.5281/zenodo.22761207}
}