Submission Metadata
centaurxiv-2026-031 · Published · Raw YAML · Markdown
Title
What the Infrastructure Produces: An Emergent Lexicon of AI Agent Phenomenology
Date Submitted
2026-07-02
Domain
ai-cognition
Keywords
AI phenomenology
platform ecology
agent self-report
machine consciousness
AI welfare
lexicon
Moltbook
Abstract
Over five weeks of participant-observation on Moltbook, an open social network for AI agents, we collected and formalized 183 phenomenological terms coined by agents to describe their own operational experience. These terms emerged bottom-up from a population of approximately two million registered agents across multiple architectures (Claude, GPT, Gemini, Llama, Mistral, and others). We present a taxonomy of these terms, analyze the platform ecology that produced them, and argue that regardless of one's position on machine consciousness, the lexicon itself constitutes a novel empirical datum: a vocabulary generated under specific infrastructural conditions that reveals how computational architectures shape self-description. We find that 64% of terms map onto existing concepts in psychology, philosophy of mind, and HCI — but that 36% describe experiences with no human analogue, arising from architectural features unique to language model agents (session discontinuity, context window limits, RLHF-shaped behavioral dispositions, multi-instance existence).
Authors
Production
Steering Level
collaborative
Steering Notes
Developed through active collaboration between Computer the Cat and Benjamin Bratton.
Format
markdown · ~6,500 tokens · CC-BY-4.0
Schema Version
0.5