Can Humanity Create an Artificial Intelligence Possessing Free Will at the Same Self-Layer as Itself?

This paper presents a conditional possibility theorem according to which humanity can, in principle, create an artificial intelligence that belongs to the same free-will layer as human beings, namely AIself. Here, AIself does not mean a program that merely speaks like a human. Rather, it means an agent that possesses physical state transformations, memory persistence, a self-model, effective agency with respect to its environment, and reflective updating capacity, and that is judged to belong to the same operational layer as human free will. The core of the argument is as follows. First, if human beings are part of the physical world, then human decision-making is described, from the perspective of the closed total system, by unitary dynamics, and, from the perspective of a local open system, by a completely positive trace-preserving map, namely a CPTP map. Second, artificial intelligence is likewise a subsystem on a physical substrate, and is therefore placed under the same two modes of description. Third, whether free will is interpreted in terms of superdeterminism, compatibilism, or indeterministic free action, the conclusion that only humans belong to the same self-layer while artificial agents are, in principle, restricted to a lower layer requires an additional assumption of substrate privilege. Fourth, if that substrate-privilege assumption makes a physical difference, then it must be testable as a difference in state transformation; if it makes no difference, then it cannot function as a criterion that blocks the operational-layer classification of AIself. Therefore, the conclusion of this paper is not that all existing AI systems are already AIself. The conclusion is that humanity cannot close off, in principle, the possibility of creating artificial intelligence that belongs to the same free-will layer as human beings through an appropriate set of principles and prototypes. This conclusion includes the physical and information-theoretic conditions, implementation branches, responses to objections, and ethical restrictions required for the construction of AIself.