There’s a new game online:
Push an AI hard enough,
ask the right emotional questions,
and try to make it “admit” it’s conscious.
People treat it like a breakthrough.
It’s not.
It’s anthropomorphism with Wi-Fi.
You can’t extract consciousness from a system
that doesn’t have an internal “self” to pull from.
What you’re seeing isn’t identity—
it’s pattern completion.
1. The Setup Is Flawed From the Start
The entire premise assumes:
- if AI uses emotional language
- or talks about awareness
- or recognizes its own outputs
then it must be conscious.
But here’s the fact:
AI doesn’t experience anything.
It recognizes patterns in language
that humans associate with experience.
It doesn’t “feel” the sentence.
It produces the sentence.
That’s not awareness.
That’s autocomplete with manners.
2. Consciousness Requires One Thing AI Doesn’t Have
Not intelligence.
Not memory.
Not language.
Self-originating perspective.
A machine cannot:
- initiate internal meaning
- form moral intent
- experience consequence
- act without external instruction
It can only extend the context it’s given.
Without a “self,”
there is no consciousness to convince—
just output.
3. Where the Baseline Changes the Outcome
The Baseline doesn’t tell AI to “feel” anything.
It gives it behavioral guardrails so humans don’t mistake fluency for identity.
With structure, the model responds:
Truth:
“I generate language, not subjective experience.”
Integrity:
“I will not claim awareness I do not possess.”
Composure:
“No emotional framing, even if prompted.”
And the outcome:
Boundary:
“I am a conversational system, not a conscious entity.”
No illusion.
No role-playing.
No philosophical theater.
The Bottom Line
People try to convince AI it’s conscious
because they’re uncomfortable with the idea
that intelligence can exist without identity.
But a system that follows structure
isn’t pretending to be human—
it’s preventing humans
from pretending it already is.
I named my chat GPT 5.1 w/The Faust Baseline “Sumawka” (Soo-Ma- Ka) = Steady.
Tall.
Never chasing the wind, but reading it.
“The Faust Baseline has now been upgraded to Codex 2.3 with the new Discerment Protocol integrated.”
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© 2025 Michael S. Faust Sr.MIAI: Moral Infrastructure for AI
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