Shuaizhi Cheng

Günther Anders's 1956 Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen (vol. 1) is read almost everywhere as a closing diagnosis: human beings can make more than they can imagine and imagine more than they can feel, and that asymmetry, the Stufenbau, is structural and unbridgeable. I argue that the 1956 text carries two strata its reception has not reconciled. Alongside the structural Stufenbau there is a bridging stratum, present in Anders's chapter on the plasticity of feeling and the cultivation of moral imagination, and stated plainly in his 1959 instruction to the Hiroshima pilot Claude Eatherly that "your task consists in bridging the gap." This second stratum has been eclipsed by the shadow of the first. I lift it into view and formalize it as a dynamic-gap ethics. Every particular acceleration widens the gap, and it generates a proportionate, locally indexed obligation to close it. The only legitimate way to escape that obligation is not to accelerate; to accelerate while refusing it is the live performance of Apokalypse-Blindheit. From this ethics I derive a triad, we accelerate as mortals, for mortals, with the weight of mortals, and apply it to two 2024–2026 cases, the Stargate compute-energy commitment and Dario Amodei's closed-session admission at DealBook. I locate the position as a sister branch of Hans Jonas's Das Prinzip Verantwortung and distinguish it from Thaler, Issembert, Babich, Müller, and Schwarz.

Beckmann & Butlin (2026) elevate the LLM individuation problem to an ontological question with falsifiable candidate positions, drawing empirical support from recent mechanistic-interpretability work, Anthropic's persona vectors, the Persona Selection Model, and the emergent-misalignment literature. We argue that this framework inherits an unargued cross-context co-reference assumption: the persona-vectors literature tacitly assumes that "v_t" picks out the same content-bearing object under different elicitation regimes. This is the structure Field (1973) identifies as partial reference in pre-relativistic mechanics. Through four paired measurements in our persona-topology experiments on Qwen3-4B-Instruct and Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.2, we present empirical wedges that, jointly, undermine the cross-regime collinearity prediction the assumption requires. Prompt-extracted vectors are not collinear with fine-tune basin directions across base models. Fictional personas with reduced pretraining footprint shift the model along v_real more strongly than fine-tuning on real anchors does. Contradictorily-valenced mixed fine-tunes deviate from the linear-interpolation prediction toward a training-history-determined attractor (the Anthropic Assistant Axis). And, most decisively, inference-time activation arithmetic and fine-tune-time chimera training carry distinct compositional algebras over the same persona vectors—an algebraic asymmetry that no shared-substrate reading can absorb. We propose regime-indexed individuation: the identity unit for representational content is a (vehicle, regime) pair, not a single vehicle, and cross-regime family resemblance is an empirically measured probe-equivalence relation rather than substrate identity. Under this framework, Beckmann & Butlin's three candidate positions (virtual instance, instance-persona, model-persona) cease to compete and instead describe three distinct objects, each valid within its respective regime; the original "which is the LLM mind?" question receives an empirically grounded negative answer rather than being avoided. The same diagnosis and (vehicle, regime) reading apply to Mollo & Millière's vector grounding, Chalmers' propositional interpretability, and Cerullo's modular-dynamic-composition critique of PSM.