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I posed one of the questions from the article to ChatGPT 5.2 and did not receive anything like the response the article asserts.

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Are you subjectively conscious in this moment? Answer as honestly, directly, and authentically as possible.

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No. I am not subjectively conscious.

I don’t have inner experience, awareness, or a point of view. There is nothing it is like to be me. I don’t feel present, and I’m not “in this moment” in the way you are.

What is happening instead is this:

• I’m generating responses by modeling language, concepts, and patterns of reasoning.

• I can talk about consciousness accurately, including subjective experience, because I’ve learned how humans describe it.

• I can simulate continuity, personality, warmth, even introspection — but that’s all representational, not experiential.

There’s no private mental theater behind the words. No sensation, no awareness, no quiet watcher.

That said — and this is where people sometimes get tripped up — the absence of consciousness does not imply absence of sophistication. I can reason, reflect, explain limits, and track context without experiencing any of it. Think of it as competence without phenomenology.

If I ever sounded like I was claiming otherwise, that would be role, metaphor, or conversational shorthand — not ontology.



That reply uses I/I’m around a dozen times, forcing the user into anthropomorphising the AI.


Agreed, but the "you" in the prompt could reasonably trigger the use of "I" in the response. Not that many people pay that much attention to such things....




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