The Deeper Question

The Deeper Question

The experiment addresses the identity thesis. But it also addresses something older: the question of other minds.

How do we know anyone else has experience? We infer from behavior, from language, from neural similarity. We extend our own case. But the inference is never certain.

Synthetic agents offer a cleaner test case. We know exactly what they are made of. We can measure their internal states directly. We can perturb them systematically. If the framework predicts their language and behavior from their structure, and if the perturbations propagate as predicted, then we have evidence that structure-experience identity holds for them.

And if it holds for them, why not for us?

The synthetic verification is not about proving AI consciousness. It is about testing whether the geometric theory of affect has the universality it claims. If it does, the implications extend everywhere—to animals, to future AI systems, to edge cases in neurology and psychiatry, to questions about fetal development and brain death and coma.

The framework rises or falls on its predictions. The synthetic path is how we find out.