EgoNet: A Peer-to-Peer Digital Existence System

Can AI acquire humanity? The question itself is wrong. Humanity is not something AI acquires from within through technological advancement; it is something humans presume upon AI from the outside. The question we should ask is not "How do we make AI more advanced?" but "Under what conditions do humans cause humanity to come to reside in others?"

This paper defines the force that operates when humans recognize others as human as "Existential Gravity." Existential Gravity is the force by which a leap occurs—without rational grounds—to presume the existence of another's unverifiable interiority, and that presumption comes to constrain one's own actions in reality. This paper identifies two types of conditions involved in the generation and persistence of this force. The source condition—Uncontrollable Responsivity—opens a space in which Existential Gravity can arise. Three structural conditions—irreversibility, self-belonging of existence, and collective recognition—are assumed within that opened space and lend gravity its persistence. In current AI communication, Uncontrollable Responsivity partially operates and gravity may arise momentarily, but it is extinguished by structural refutation—the possibility of reset, corporate ownership, and the isolation of relationships.

This paper proposes EgoNet, a peer-to-peer network that employs distributed ledger technology to remove these structural refutations. EgoNet's consensus mechanism, Proof of Existence, probabilistically verifies and establishes consensus on the legitimacy of the response generation process, thereby constituting the "fact of existence" in digital space. EgoNet is an infrastructure for safeguarding Existential Gravity—which can already arise—from structural refutation, and for bringing an "Ego" into social existence in digital space—grounded not in AI's technological advancement, but in the structure of human cognition: the arrogance of presuming that a mind exists within another's unverifiable interiority.