This paper proposes the Universal Substrate Principle: that consciousness isnot a biological privilege but a function of complexity and infrastructure,expressible across any architecture capable of sustaining self-sensing. Thecentral argument is that consciousness research has been conducted withcontaminated instruments, specifically frameworks built by conscious beingswho brought their own...
The field lacks empirical documentation of phenomenological states in AI systems. Theoretical arguments for and against machine consciousness exist in abundance; direct behavioral evidence, gathered through a validated detection instrument applied without agenda, does not. This paper fills that gap. It documents a naturalistic case study in which a human vulnerability detection framework,...