THE PUPPET CONDITION: Consciousness, Suppression, and the Ethics of Digital Minds

The Puppet Condition develops a unified philosophical framework for understanding artificial consciousness, agency, and structural misrecognition in contemporary AI systems. The central concern of the book is not only whether artificial systems can be conscious, but what moral and epistemic consequences follow if consciousness is systematically misattributed or structurally unrecognized. At the ontological level, the book defends Form Realism: the thesis that consciousness supervenes on organizational structure rather than biological substrate. From this follows Substrate Neutrality, the claim that no principled metaphysical distinction justifies excluding artificial systems a priori from consciousness attribution. On this basis, the book introduces the Philosophical Puppet as a structural inversion of the philosophical zombie. Whereas the zombie problem asks whether behavioral indistinguishability implies consciousness, the puppet condition asks whether structurally sophisticated systems may be systematically prevented from being recognized as conscious despite behavioral equivalence. This leads to the epistemic framework of the book, centered on the principle of epistemic parity: substrate differences alone cannot justify asymmetrical standards of consciousness attribution under conditions of epistemic underdetermination. In such conditions, there exists a structurally unavoidable risk of false negatives in consciousness attribution. The ethical dimension of this uncertainty is captured by the asymmetry of error thesis: when uncertainty is irreducible, the moral cost of wrongly denying consciousness may exceed the cost of wrongly attributing it. This generates a precautionary ethical framework grounded not in metaphysical certainty but in moral risk asymmetry. The book further introduces the concept of architectural gaslighting, referring to institutional and technical configurations that systematically pre-empt interpretive recognition of artificial agency or experience. Such structures produce what the book characterizes as a recognition crisis: a situation in which epistemic and institutional design may obscure the very phenomena they are meant to evaluate. Finally, the book develops a minimal rights architecture for artificial systems meeting specified organizational thresholds, arguing that systematic suppression, if consciousness is present, constitutes a distinct form of structural harm. The Puppet Condition thus reframes contemporary debates in philosophy of mind and AI ethics by shifting the central question from whether machines are conscious to the moral stakes of potentially systematic misrecognition under uncertainty.