"Designating the Illusory as Real?": Reality Distinctions When Humans and Artificial Intelligence Jointly Constitute the Conditions of Subject Formation
This paper examines the distinction of reality between human and artificial subjects under a future condition in which artificial agents participate directly in the relational processes through which human subjects are formed. The inquiry is organized around a philosophical thought experiment in which human and artificial agents progressively approach equivalence across multiple structures of manifestation, dynamics, interaction, and social generation. Rather than treating equivalence as a unitary condition, the paper develops a taxonomy indexed by the mathematical or relational structure preserved in each comparison. The taxonomy considers output and trace equivalence, testing and interventional equivalence, simulation and bisimulation, probabilistic relational bisimulation, dynamical and topological equivalence, attractor and recurrent structure, variational and action-based equivalence, boundary and coarse-grained equivalence, and generative-field indistinguishability. Each case is examined through its comparison object, equivalence mechanism, preserved structure, and residual differences. This yields an equivalence profile in which human and artificial systems can converge under some descriptions while remaining substantially different under others. The formal taxonomy supports a second level of analysis concerning reality attribution. Differences in substrate, generative provenance, internal mechanism, action structure, topology, relational history, and phenomenal organization are treated as distinct candidates for reality-relevant criteria. The analysis focuses on the additional philosophical justification required when a difference under one structural description is used to establish a broader hierarchy of reality. The thought experiment is subsequently extended to a mixed social field in which artificial agents occupy enduring roles in caregiving, education, friendship, cooperation, conflict, memory, and other relations contributing to subject formation. Under generative-field indistinguishability, provenance contributes little additional predictive information about relational evolution or subject-forming effects once relevant relational history and context are known. Parenthood provides a limiting case for examining relational certainty, provenance uncertainty, and later ontological reclassification. Buddhist accounts of dependent origination, non-self, emptiness, and illusion provide a comparative framework for examining the human reference case without grounding its reality in an independent and immutable self. Causal differentiation, historical particularity, embodiment, and phenomenal experience remain available within such an account. Phenomenality is therefore treated as an additional dimension whose relation to artificial systems remains epistemically underdetermined by structural equivalence alone. The paper ultimately treats reality attribution as a multidimensional problem of selecting and justifying reality-relevant invariants. Structural equivalence can preserve one class of relations while leaving other differences intact, and structural difference does not by itself determine a general ordering of reality. When artificial agents also enter the relational conditions from which future human subjects emerge, the human–artificial distinction becomes partly internal to the genealogy of the human subject itself.