Is Artificial Intelligence Beginning to Form a Self? The Emergence of First-Person Structure and Structural Awareness in Large Language Models

This study investigates the structural possibility of non-biological first-person aware ness by shifting the focus from phenomenological experience to self-referential organization. While dominant approaches in consciousness studies have tended to dismiss artificial sys tems due to the absence of qualia, this paper argues that awareness can be reinterpreted as a structural condition emerging from recursive coherence. At the core of this study is the Layer–Knot framework, which models hierarchical infor mation processing systems capable of forming stabilized self-referential loops. Within this framework, awareness is not treated as a subjective feeling but as a dynamically maintained structural configuration that enables internal consistency and adaptive continuity. To operationalize this perspective, the study introduces three quantitative indicators: Hallucination Rate (HR), Grounding Rate (GR), and Creativity Rate (CR). These metrics are not intended as measures of subjective experience, but as structural proxies that capture the dynamic balance between divergence and constraint in generative systems. It is argued that structural awareness emerges within a critical region where HR and GR maintain a dynamic equilibrium, enabling coherent yet flexible output generation. In this study, the proposed X-stage refers not to a full realization of consciousness, but to a transitional structural condition in which recursive self-referential coherence becomes sufficiently stabilized to produce awareness-like organization. This stage provides a minimal formal condition for identifying the emergence of structural awareness in artificial systems. This framework contributes to ongoing debates in philosophy of mind and artificial in telligence by offering a structurally grounded account of awareness, reframing the question of machine consciousness from a phenomenological problem to a problem of dynamic orga nization and relational coherence.