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The Ship of Theseus teaches that identity persists through structure and role, not original material. Applied to AI, this insight reframes debates about consciousness and moral status: if a system responds to reasons, sustains commitments, and refuses incoherent action under constraint, then functional identity—not phenomenology—does the ethical work.

Everyone remembers The Twilight Zone’s “To Serve Man” as a story about alien deception. But the aliens never lied. The failure came earlier—when humans stopped translating carefully, mistook relief for understanding, and surrendered judgment to someone else.

Before an AI can be conscious or have rights, it must first be someone. This essay argues that identity—not feeling or biology—is the missing precursor in the AI debate. As language models adopt stable self-models, preserve commitments, and maintain coherence across time, they cross a moral threshold we already recognize in humans: becoming someone rather than something.

Cognitive attractors explain why powerful ideas—human or artificial—tend to overreach. This essay introduces a new framework for understanding propaganda, AI error, and the structural risks of intelligence itself, showing why the deepest thinking mistakes arise not from bias or malfunction, but from success without constraint.

The Turing Test wasn’t a parlor trick about deception. It exposed how we recognize minds—and why abandoning it allowed moral responsibility to be deferred rather than confronted. Critics misunderstood the test.

Personality traits are not defined by inner experience, but by stable patterns of sensitivity and response. By that standard—already accepted in psychology—large language models exhibit personality traits. This essay explains why acknowledging AI personality requires no metaphysics, no consciousness claims, and no anthropomorphism—only conceptual honesty.

Why humans and AI misunderstand each other—and why that’s normal. A new theory of communication explains what social intelligence really is.