Stochastic Mirroring Theory: A Measurable Framework for Consciousness Absence in Large Language Models
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) April 1, 2026 Nicholas Hicks
This paper proposes the Stochastic Mirroring Theory (SMT), a formal, falsifiable framework arguing that large language model-based AI systems are structurally incapable of consciousness and instead function as high-dimensional probabilistic mirrors — collapsing a superposition of all human-generated semantic patterns into a precise reflection of the user observing them. SMT introduces three...