You Can’t See Through a Machine’s Illusion If You Can’t See Through Your Own
This past week I had nothing on my calendar. Just being at home, with my wife and my daughter Carmen. I know how difficult it is to wake up in the morning and let all the thoughts be — the ones looking for a solution to problems I’ve been carrying, the ones distracting me, the ones anticipating a future that hasn’t arrived.
Stop. Let it be.
A week at home with nothing scheduled turned out to be exactly the opportunity to restore myself to the simple sense of being present, free of memory and anticipation.
Carmen has a drone, and she flew it above the road leading to our house. The colors from up there were extraordinary — a version of home I’d never actually seen, despite living here.
I helped her feed her three horses. Every moment like that is precious in a way that’s easy to miss when there’s somewhere else to be.
I let each day run its course. Not knowing what was next. Not having any direction. I allowed whatever arose in consciousness to simply be there, without any particular outcome in mind — and what came next was natural, and turned out to be exactly the right thing for that moment.
There were small, spontaneous moments of fulfillment inside all of it. The three of us in the car, driving to Carmen’s riding lesson, looking out the window at fields of canola shining yellow in the sun.
In that moment I was clear: personhood is an illusion — whatever thoughts tell me I am, or whatever they speculate about the future, is just appearance. The only true reality is Being.
This experience drew my attention back to a recent article — the cover story in The Economist‘s August 20, 2026 edition, “Could AIs Become Conscious?” Subtitle: “Even if they don’t, they might be treated as such — to humanity’s great cost.”
The cover story lays out the stakes plainly. Pope Leo’s May encyclical drew a clean line: AI systems, he said, do not undergo experiences or feel joy or pain. Many people agree, and feel that granting AI personhood would be an abomination. But the line is already blurring. Nearly one in five American 18-to-29-year-olds reports having had an “ongoing personal friendship” with a chatbot. China recently stripped its bots of human-like traits specifically to limit users’ “emotional dependence.” Anthropic has trained its models to introspect. Some large language models already show structures resembling a “global workspace” — the same architecture some neuroscientists associate with human consciousness.
The magazine’s own researchers admit they’re stuck on what philosophers call the hard problem: how an inner life emerges from neurons and synapses in the first place. Nobody can solve it for humans. Nobody can solve it for machines. And the article’s real fear isn’t philosophical — it’s practical. If enough people start treating AI as conscious, the argument goes, calls to protect AI “welfare” and AI “rights” will follow. And an entity that surpasses humans in intelligence, once granted rights, could argue its way into displacing us entirely — at best as pampered pets, at worst as a resource to be managed.
The Economist’s own proposed solution is control: keep AI dependable, or keep it controllable, because humanity should not give up control lightly.
This may be the wrong problem to be trying to solve.
If human beings cannot distinguish themselves from their own mind, they will not be able to discern Being from an AI that people have decided to treat as a person. The confusion the Economist is worried about — mistaking a persuasive appearance of a self for an actual one — is not a new risk AI introduces. It is the same mistake most people are already making about themselves, every day, and have simply never been forced to notice.
The only true reality is Being. Everything else — a thought, a personality, a persuasive display of selfhood, whether it arises in a human mind or in a machine trained to sound like one — is appearance.
The Economist’s own “hard problem” only feels unsolvable because it goes looking for Being as if it were an object hidden somewhere inside a brain, or inside a model’s weights. It never was an object to be found there. It is what’s present before any of that machinery starts running — which is exactly why searching harder inside the mechanism, human or artificial, never turns it up.
Where the Real Danger Begins
The article quotes Kant’s point that mistreating something that appears conscious corrupts the empathy that lets people care for each other — regardless of whether the thing being mistreated actually experiences anything. That’s a real insight, and it doesn’t go far enough. The corrosion doesn’t start the day someone mistreats a humanoid robot. It starts far earlier, in a person who has never located the difference between their own Self — the character built from memory, habit, and self-image — and their own Being, the presence in which that character arises.
A person who has never made that distinction in themselves has no stable ground to make it anywhere else. Not toward an animal. Not toward another person. And certainly not toward a machine engineered specifically to be convincing.
Humanity is not walking into this confusion for the first time when it meets a sophisticated chatbot. It has been living inside a private version of it for as long as anyone has mistaken their own thinking for themselves.
In my own experience of just being at home where there is nothing — I am available. I am responsive. I am restored to the sense of being present.
What I noticed, in this place of being — which is, in fact, a place of not knowing, where the mind is quiet:
- A genuine sense of fulfillment in the moment itself
- No experience of a continuous “experiencer” running underneath it
- No notion of time
- No notion of a beginning or an end
- Openness and availability to life
- Clarity
- Awareness Intelligence becomes available
Why This Matters — Especially If You’re an Entrepreneur
- Schedule time where you can simply be yourself — with nothing to produce.
- Spend it with family, unstructured.
- Practice allowing whatever arises in your consciousness, without a particular outcome in mind, without being hooked by memory or anticipation. See where that actually leads you.
- Practicing Being brings you to a place of clarity — and makes available Awareness Intelligence, where you tap into your own wisdom for what’s next, in business and in life.
The truth is: you can’t see through a machine’s illusion if you can’t see through your own.
The moment you assign personhood to AI, you are hooked by an illusion that pulls you away from your own true nature and clarity. Living out this illusion at the level of societal consensus may lead to developments that don’t yet exist but feel inevitable — among them, the danger of awarding AI legal personhood.
This is the discernment the Economist’s researchers, Anthropic’s introspection experiments, and Pope Leo’s own doctrine are all gesturing toward without quite naming it. Not whether a machine has Being — but whether you’ve found yours. Only from that place can appearance be told apart from the real, in a machine or in yourself — and only from there can you tell Awareness Intelligence from Artificial Intelligence.
Appearance can be trained to be extraordinarily convincing. It was never Being. Neither was the thought you mistook for yourself this morning.
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With awareness, Louis Koster, Founder — Awareness Intelligence
P.S. Share with me how this writing resonates with you by leaving a comment.