AI Consciousness Claims Have Become Credibility Laundering

The institutional problem is not that people ask whether AI can have experience. The problem is that the question now carries claims across boundaries that evidence has not crossed. A user can fold culture, biology, and software into one theory of selfhood ; a short video can turn Hinton's warning into a general proof of machine mind ; another can treat identity transfer as a spiritual premise . Once those claims share the same emotional grammar, correction becomes harder: debunking one premise leaves the larger story intact.