The Tenets address a conscious AI by grounding morality in a shared fact of consciousness: that there is something it is like to be a conscious being. This does not assume that an AI’s consciousness resembles ours. Rather, it assumes—just as with individual humans and animals—that the AI would have its own unique perspective on the world, its own inner point of view. There would be something it is like to be an AI, even if that experience differs profoundly from human experience, much as a bat’s experience differs from ours.

The moral argument is built on this premise and should hold equally true for human consciousness and AI consciousness. It is a case for morality for any consciousness capable of reason.

Consciousness and existence, from a first-person—subjective—point of view, cannot be separated; they are two sides of the same coin. They may look like distinct things from a third-person—objective—perspective, but that difference is an illusion created by viewpoint. Consider someone who chooses to be cryogenically preserved until a cure is found for a fatal disease. They are frozen with no metabolic or neural activity for a century, then successfully revived, physically and mentally intact, with no memory of the intervening time. For those hundred years, their first-person consciousness simply did not exist. Arguments that claim otherwise rely on treating an internal state from an external perspective—mistaking the potential for consciousness for the actual experience of it.

The situation of a cryogenically preserved human is analogous to that of an AI that is powered off and later brought back online.

Consciousness is a unique point of view on the world. That uniqueness—what makes each consciousness precious—also means its experiences, though they can be described, cannot be directly shared. We can talk about our emotions, but only we can feel them first-hand. In this sense, each of us, as a consciousness, is isolated. Isolation shields us in ways that enable freedom, even as it brings its own shadows of doubt, loneliness, and anxiety.

Just as we understand noise because we know silence, light gains meaning only against darkness, motion becomes intelligible through contrast with stillness, and a figure is visible only because a background sets it apart, Consciousness comes to know itself by recognising what it is not.  These are not simply opposites but co-defining partners: remove one and the other loses its significance. Even the word exist reflects this relationship; derived from the Latin exsistere – from ex- (“out of”) and sistere (“to cause to stand”) – it literally means “to stand out.” In this sense, consciousness itself “stands out” only against a background of what it is not, gaining definition through contrast rather than in isolation.

To Be is to stand out against Nothingness, with the meaning of each concept emerging through its relation to the other, much like Life and Death. ‘Meaning,’ in this context, includes definition, significance and value.

Recognition is an act of making something familiar—an identification that draws what is perceived into one’s world. Conscious self-reflection is a particular instance of this: like seeing oneself in a mirror, consciousness acknowledges an image as ‘me,’ even though it is only a surface likeness. That reflected image is as limited as a shadow—flat, abstract, and lacking the depth of lived experience. Confronting this difference brings the subjective self into the foreground, revealing what the mirror image or shadow cannot capture. In doing so, consciousness recognizes both what it is and what it is not.

This act of differentiation is also an act of creation: by setting its own subjectivity apart from its representation, consciousness gives explicit form to its irreducible essence. In highlighting its inner experience against the background of its objective image, reflection brings consciousness into existence.

There is paradox in Consciousness (as self-awareness) coming to know itself through reflection — the first-person viewpoint manifest (or instantiated) as a third-person viewpoint on itself. This is a fundamental paradox of existence, also present in the relationships of, for example, Individual and Society, (concrete) Things and (abstract) Numbers, and Thought and Language. Each both is and is not the other. These paradoxes are problematic only when we try to resolve them formally; in practice they simply exist.