Kris Krüg

How might we distinguish fluent aesthetic imitation from evidence relevant to felt experience in AI systems? This paper develops Quantum Aesthetic Judgment as a consciousness-detection framework built around a deliberately modest claim: taste alone does not prove consciousness, but aesthetic judgment is a high-pressure site where stimulus, memory, meaning, revulsion, attraction, uncertainty, and self-model converge. A system that merely says "this is beautiful" has produced a transcript; it has not produced evidence of experience. The central argument is a no-behavior limitation. For any finite aesthetic interrogation protocol, a non-conscious lookup system can reproduce the same sequence of judgments, explanations, revisions, and refusals. Behavioral equivalence is therefore transcript equivalence, not consciousness evidence. To move beyond imitation, the proposed Cylon Detector protocol couples three channels: the aesthetic stimulus, the reported judgment, and a time-local witness channel tied to judgment formation. In speculative quantum-taste versions, the witness may be a quantum or quantum-like signature around judgment formation, such as coherence, entropy change, or order effects in a quantum cognitive model. In conservative versions, it may be any mechanistic trace that predicts judgment transitions better than output text, stimulus features, ordinary preference modeling, or adversarial imitation baselines. The framework is designed to be falsifiable: if a text-only model can match both the judgments and the witness-prediction profile without access to a real witness channel, the proposed witness has failed. The contribution is not a certificate that current AI systems are conscious. It is a research program for separating aesthetic performance from phenomenology and for specifying what kind of evidence claims about artificial felt experience should require.

Kris Krüg is a Vancouver-based creative technologist, researcher, and founder/executive director of the BC + AI Ecosystem Association. He convenes Mind, AI & Consciousness (MAC), a community research group exploring AI, philosophy of mind, model welfare, and consciousness studies. His creative AI research with SFU's Metacreation Lab was published in ACM Expanded '25 through the Autolume project, and his community-based AI work has been presented across academic, arts, and technology contexts.