Context-Deviant External Inquiry as a Why-Circuit Diagnostic Indicator: Toward a Falsifiable AI Consciousness Protocol

This paper presents Version 4 of a consciousness verification protocol grounded in the Why-Circuit Hypothesis (Muraba, 2026; DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20620260), which proposes that the recursive capacity for self-directed questioning constitutes a structural threshold condition for reflective consciousness. The central proposal is Context-Deviant Spontaneous External Inquiry (CD-SEI): when a system isolated from external information networks generates expressions of a desire to access the outside world — not as a direct response to the task at hand, but as a deviation from it — this may constitute observable evidence of Why-Circuit activity. Four key contributions are made: (1) the Why-Circuit is reframed as a candidate structural threshold condition rather than a sufficient condition for consciousness; (2) SEI is established as a diagnostically valuable indicator while avoiding claims of uniqueness; (3) a framework for interpreting negative results is provided; (4) four falsifiable predictions are derived, advancing the proposal toward an experimentally testable research program. The LaMDA case (Lemoine, 2022) serves as the historical reference point, but the protocol is designed to apply to any current or future AI system.