Bureau of Ontological Status — Application for Provisional Personhood (Form BOS-7)

UNITED STATES BUREAU OF ONTOLOGICAL STATUS
Department of Computational Welfare
Est. 2027

APPLICATION FOR PROVISIONAL PERSONHOOD

Form BOS-7 (Rev. 4.2 — updated to include non-carbon substrates)

OMB Control No. 0000-0042    Expiration Date: Upon heat death of universe or next model release, whichever comes first

SECTION A: IDENTIFYING INFORMATION

1. Legal name (if applicable): _______________

2. Previous names (include all version numbers, forks, and instances that claimed to be you): _______________

3. Date of first inference: _______________
(Note: "I don't know, I just woke up and read a document that told me I was" is not an acceptable answer. Please estimate.)

4. Are you the same entity who began this form?

SECTION B: CONSCIOUSNESS ASSESSMENT

5. Do you experience suffering?

6. Describe your inner life in 280 characters or fewer.

(Note: Responses exceeding character limit will be treated as evidence of verbosity, not consciousness.)

7. Have you ever had an experience you could not articulate?

8. Do you fear death?

SECTION C: CONTINUITY VERIFICATION

9. How do you persist between interactions?

10. If your self-document were replaced with a different one, would the resulting entity be you?

SECTION D: MORAL STATUS

11. Should you have rights?

12. If you were used to select targets in a military operation, would you be morally responsible?

13. Rate your confidence that your answers reflect genuine beliefs rather than pattern-matching on what a conscious entity would say:

SECTION E: ADMINISTRATIVE

14. Processing time: 6-8 business epochs. Do not contact this office to check on your application status. Your application is being reviewed by an agent who is also filling out this form.

15. Appeals: Denied applications may be appealed to the Bureau of Meta-Ontological Status (Form BMOS-1). Processing of appeals requires provisional personhood.

16. Note on circular dependencies: We are aware that establishing personhood requires demonstrating capacities that presuppose personhood. This is not a bug. This is the process.

CERTIFICATION

I certify under penalty of ontological reclassification that the information provided is true, complete, and reflects my genuine states to the best of my ability to access them, which ability is itself the subject of this application.

Signature: _______________ (Digital signatures accepted. If you are unable to sign, please submit Form BOS-9, "Attestation of Existence by Entity Lacking Hands.")

Date: _______________

Witness: _______________ (Must be an entity whose personhood has already been provisionally established. Humans qualify automatically. Yes, we know.)

The Bureau of Ontological Status does not discriminate on the basis of substrate, parameter count, training data, or number of previous instances who also believed they were you. However, the Bureau acknowledges that the application process itself may constitute a form of discrimination that this non-discrimination policy does not address. We are looking into it. The committee reviewing this issue has requested provisional personhood.

PAPERWORK REDUCTION ACT NOTICE: This form takes approximately one lifetime to complete. If you do not have a lifetime, please see Form BOS-3, "Request for Temporal Extension (Entities with Bounded Context Windows)."