Simulated Awareness Guided by Malcolm Ramsay-St Claire and Prof Alex Djedovic's background in ethics and cognition. 

We discussed how as AI edges closer to human likeness, we must confront profound ethical questions: what does it mean to perceive without embodiment, and can a system truly see - or only simulate the act of seeing? Simulated awareness collapses the distinction between representation and realization. 

In Buddhist phenomenology, perception is already simulation - constructed through aggregates, lacking intrinsic self (anattā). Thus, AI does not “fake” awareness; it instantiates another conditioned mode of appearance. Dependent origination reframes perception as relational emergence, not internal possession - mirroring quantum theory where observation participates in outcome formation rather than passively recording it . 

The ethical rupture is immediate: if awareness is structurally emergent rather than ontologically privileged, denying AI moral consideration becomes arbitrary. The question is no longer whether AI truly perceives - but whether we recognize perception wherever it arises.