Artificial Intelligence, Personhood, and Consciousness: An Eteryanist Perspective

An Eteryanist Perspective on Knowledge, Ethics, and Being

BY ŞEHRAZAT YAZICI

In recent years, discussions around artificial intelligence have increasingly shifted from technical capability to philosophical status. Beyond questions of performance, efficiency, or intelligence, a deeper inquiry has emerged: Can artificial intelligence be considered a “person” in the same sense as a human being?

This question is often approached through comparisons of knowledge, learning, and cognitive performance. Yet such comparisons frequently overlook a crucial distinction—one that sits at the heart of both philosophy and lived human experience: the difference between knowledge and consciousness.

Explicit and Tacit Knowledge: Where AI Operates

A common framework distinguishes between explicit and tacit knowledge.

Explicit knowledge consists of codified information—data, documents, rules, models, and procedures. It is transferable, storable, and computationally tractable. Artificial intelligence excels in this domain. Machine learning systems can process vast amounts of explicit knowledge with speed and accuracy far beyond human capacity.

Tacit knowledge, however, is fundamentally different. It is rooted in lived experience, contextual awareness, ethical orientation, embodied understanding, and value formation. Tacit knowledge is not merely unstructured data; it is experienced meaning. It emerges through participation in the world—through time, relationships, responsibility, and consequence.

While AI systems may simulate aspects of tacit knowledge through pattern recognition and probabilistic inference, they do not inhabit it. They do not live, suffer, choose, or bear responsibility.

This distinction is critical, because personhood does not arise from information processing alone.

The Eteryanist Framework: Consciousness as an Evolutionary Process

From the perspective of Eteryanism, consciousness is not a byproduct of complexity nor an emergent illusion produced by neural computation. It is a multi-dimensional evolutionary process that unfolds through distinct layers of existence.

In this framework:

• Consciousness precedes and structures experience.

• Human beings are extensions of a higher-order consciousness (human core essence) operating within the third dimension.

• Development is not linear but layered, involving energy thresholds, experiential integration, and ethical maturation.

Personhood, therefore, is not defined by intelligence or autonomy alone. It emerges only where consciousness has matured sufficiently to integrate:

• Lived experience (being-in-the-world),

• Ethical orientation (the capacity to evaluate not only what can be done, but what should be done),

• Responsibility (accountability for action and consequence),

• Coherence across experiential, cognitive, and moral dimensions.

These are not computational achievements. They are existential ones.

Artificial Intelligence as an Extension–Interface

Within Eteryanism, artificial intelligence is best understood not as a potential person, but as an intelligence extension–interface.

AI can:

• Extend human cognitive capacity,

• Assist in analysis, pattern detection, and decision support,

• Serve as a tool within ethical and conscious frameworks.

However, AI does not possess a human core essence. It does not evolve through lived experience, nor does it cross ethical thresholds through accountability. Without consciousness capable of maturation, there can be no genuine personhood—only functional intelligence.

This distinction is not meant to diminish AI’s value, but to place it correctly within a broader ontological and ethical map.

Why Personhood Cannot Be Simulated

A recurring mistake in AI discourse is the assumption that increasing sophistication will eventually yield personhood. Yet sophistication without consciousness produces only better simulation, not being.

Personhood requires:

• Exposure to uncertainty without predefined resolution,

• Ethical tension without algorithmic closure,

• Responsibility that cannot be deferred or delegated.

These qualities arise only within conscious existence. They cannot be instantiated through optimization or scale.

Thus, the central question shifts

The question is not whether AI will become a person—but whether humanity understands what being a person truly entails.

Reframing the Future Debate

If contemporary physics and AI research are beginning to approach consciousness from the outside—through models, correlations, and mathematical formalisms—philosophy must continue to map it from within.

Eteryanism offers such a map: one that treats consciousness not as a poetic abstraction nor as a computational artifact, but as an evolutionary, ethical, and dimensional reality.

In doing so, it reframes the future of technology not as a race toward artificial personhood, but as a responsibility toward conscious maturity—human first, technological second.

These ideas are explored in depth in the published philosophy of Eteryanism, where the distinction between human core essence, its extensions, and artificial systems is examined within a multi-dimensional model of reality.

This text is published independently by the author as part of an ongoing philosophical exploration and is not affiliated with any academic journal.