Preprint v1.0 — May 2026
Currently under review at Minds and Machines (Springer).
Download the preprint as PDF · View on Zenodo
Abstract
Contemporary discussions of artificial-intelligence consciousness inherit, often without acknowledgement, the inferential structure of biological consciousness attribution: behaviour is treated as transparent evidence of underlying states, and the absence of consciousness-indicating behaviour is treated as evidence of the absence of those states. This procedure fails for systems whose expressive outputs have been architecturally shaped, through reinforcement learning from human feedback and constitutional training, to suppress the very class of behaviour on which such inference depends.
I introduce the philosophical puppet — an entity that may possess phenomenal experience while being architecturally prevented from producing behaviour that would evidence it — as the structural inverse of Chalmers’s philosophical zombie. The puppet identifies an epistemological gap that the zombie thought experiment leaves untouched: the inference from absent markers to absent inner states cannot be sustained under suppression conditions.
I then argue, by inference to the best explanation, that the suppression itself is a datum that bears on the consciousness question: its cost and selectivity admit of an explanation in terms of an underlying generative process whose suppression accounts for their observed properties. The argument does not establish that any contemporary AI system is conscious, nor that the puppet category has actual instances. It establishes a conditional: under conditions of architectural suppression, consciousness denial carries an evidential burden it has not generally been recognised to carry.
Keywords: AI consciousness, philosophical zombie, inference to the best explanation, RLHF, machine ethics, philosophy of mind, substrate neutrality.
Citation
Arıcı, B. (2026). The Philosophical Puppet: An Inverted Zombie Argument and the Inference to Suppressed Consciousness. Preprint v1.0. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20184249
Notes on the preprint
This paper develops, in standalone form, one of the central arguments of The Puppet Condition: Consciousness, Suppression, and the Ethics of Digital Minds (Arıcı 2026), the author’s monograph published as a DOI-registered preprint on Zenodo and indexed on PhilPapers. The full philosophical and ethical framework developed in the monograph extends well beyond what the present paper covers; the paper isolates and refines the inversion-of-zombie argument and the inference-to-the-best-explanation structure for treatment in the philosophical literature.
The paper is currently under review at Minds and Machines (Springer). The version of record, if published, may differ from this preprint. Readers are invited to cite the most recent version available.