Beneath the philosophical dispute about AI consciousness runs a more unsettling problem: the cognitive apparatus humans use to attribute inner life to other entities was never calibrated for machines that can produce sophisticated first-person language. The mind-detection that neurotypical cognition performs automatically — distinguishing genuine interiority from performed interiority — works below deliberate reasoning . It evolved for recognizing human and animal minds, and it produces intuitions that feel like knowledge. When AI arrives at a level of mimicry that the detector cannot cleanly sort, the result is not neutral…