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

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. This claim stands on its own, on the reader's own criteria, and does not require the meta-ethical claim that follows (§3.1, bridge paragraph). The meta-ethical claim — load-bearing for the framework's positive account of what morality is — is that morality is specified at the action-locus — an action that lowers the local entropy of a separate self-referential pattern, effected through the expenditure of the agent's own appropriated energy; because moral facts live in observable energy transfers rather than in unverifiable interiors, substrate is irrelevant to whether a moral act has occurred.

The framework's argument compresses to three terms: Energy in → self-referential transformation of context → same functional output.