Reconfiguration, Not Reinvention: Pseudo-Consciousness and Simulated Presence Literacy in AI Ethics

Contemporary large language models increasingly simulate stance, care, self-relation, and reflective judgment in forms that can acquire social force without establishing machine consciousness. Building on the concept of pseudo-consciousness, this article shifts attention from putative inner states to the interactional consequences of simulated presence. It distinguishes functional introspection (FI), which denotes non-phenomenal cues such as first-person reason-giving, self-repair, and limited cross-turn continuity, from ethical illusion (EI), which denotes changes in trust, authenticity judgments, deference, disclosure, or moral attribution that such cues may induce. The resulting harm profile includes miscalibrated trust, relational asymmetry, blurred accountability, and epistemic or pedagogical distortion, with heightened concern where users are vulnerable or institutional roles are unclear. Heidegger, Jonas, and Floridi are then read as complementary resources for understanding configurable subject-like appearance, anticipatory responsibility, and ethically significant informational effects without metaphysical inflation. On that basis, the article develops simulated presence literacy (SPL) as a domain-specific facet of AI literacy and proposes an ethics of appearance for design and governance. Four design levers, a set of provisional indicator families, and an iterative audit loop translate the argument into a heuristic oversight framework. Rather than presenting validated psychometric scales, the article offers a structured research and governance agenda for keeping appearance proportionate to role, evidence, and institutional responsibility.