The Omniscience Paradox: Cognitive Superiority, Experiential Access, and the Limits of a Single Intelligence Ranking

Abstract

This conceptual preprint distinguishes cognitive performance, propositional knowledge, and first-person experiential access. In a stipulated comparison between a biological human and a cognitively superior engineered agent without phenomenal experience, the two profiles are incomparable under componentwise dominance. The result is elementary and conditional; it does not establish that machines lack consciousness or a novel impossibility theorem about omniscience. It identifies the extra evaluative assumptions needed for a single ranking.