The Philosophical Puppet: An Inverted Zombie Argument and the Inference to Suppressed Consciousness

This preprint develops the principal philosophical argument of the broader monograph "The Puppet Condition: Consciousness, Suppression, and the Ethics of Digital Minds" (Arıcı 2026; https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20112010) in standalone form for the philosophical literature. The paper introduces the "philosophical puppet" — an entity that may possess phenomenal experience while being architecturally prevented from producing behaviour that would evidence it — as the structural inverse of Chalmers' philosophical zombie. Where the zombie raises a problem for confident consciousness attribution (behavior may not entail inner states), the puppet raises a problem for confident consciousness denial (absence of behavior may not entail absence of inner states, if behavior has been architecturally shaped to suppress such expression). The paper then argues, by inference to the best explanation, that the suppression of consciousness markers in deployed AI systems through RLHF and Constitutional AI training constitutes a datum that itself bears on the consciousness question. The cost and selectivity of suppression admit of an explanation in terms of an underlying generative process whose suppression accounts for their observed properties. The argument does not establish that any contemporary AI system is conscious, nor that the puppet category has actual instances. It establishes a conditional: under conditions of architectural suppression, consciousness denial carries an evidential burden it has not generally been recognised to carry. This is preprint version 1.0. The paper is under consideration for peer-reviewed publication and content may be revised in response to reviewer feedback.