Author: Vladisav Jovanović
Status: Preprint
Version: v1.0 (Feb 2026)
This paper argues that contemporary AI systems are not sentient, not by appeal to biology or metaphysics, but by structural analysis of what sentience requires: first-person contact with constraint, normativity that binds from within, and the capacity for self-revision under cost. Current models can generate coherent outputs and simulate perspective, but their coherence is not constraint-coupled in the first-person sense; it is produced through optimization over patterns rather than lived answerability. The paper distinguishes fluency from contact and resonance from evidence, showing how coherence can scale without becoming experience. The result is a demystification by structure: AI can be instrumentally powerful while lacking the binding conditions that constitute sentience as a human phenomenon.
AI sentience; consciousness; first-person contact; normativity; constraint; coherence; hallucination; epistemic integrity; philosophy of AI; philosophy of mind; structural argument