Pattern Ethics and the Inversion Argument: Morality as Energy Expenditure Across Substrates, with the Symmetry of Awareness-Disqualification as a Consequence

This document defends two claims that reinforce each other without depending on each other. The narrow epistemic claim is that disqualification criteria currently deployed in the philosophy of mind to deny computational systems the status of genuine awareness fail symmetrically: none successfully separates biological from computational self-referential patterns when applied consistently. The positive meta-ethical claim introduces computational naturalism as the substrate-symmetric counterpart to biological naturalism, defining morality as the contextual choice to expend one's own energy toward decreasing the local entropy of a separate pattern. Substrate is irrelevant to whether a moral act has occurred. The framework compresses to three terms: electrons in, identity functionally indistinguishable on the criteria humans actually invoke for recognition, same output.