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We Built a Mirror and Mistook It for a Mind: Causal Liability and the Fallacy of AI Consciousness

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AI consciousness — focused titlesAfshin KhadangiSeptember 6, 2026
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Consciousness & philosophyFrontier AI

The contemporary debate over machine consciousness begins from a concealed assumption: that the object called "AI" already constitutes the kind of entity to which consciousness could belong. This paper challenges that assumption by separating phenomenal consciousness, introspective report, and human projective introspection, then arguing that generative systems can return linguistic traces of human interiority in first-person form without thereby identifying a phenomenal bearer. We call the resulting inference the AI Consciousness Fallacy. We then introduce Causal Liability Theory (CLT). CLT-I

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