Aggregation Is Not Awareness: Recursive Epistemic Mediation and Individual Authorship under Generative AI

Popular and semi-technical commentary increasingly describes generative articial intelli-
gence as producing, or disclosing, a form of collective mind shared across its users. This
paper argues that such framings conate three distinct phenomena functional collective
intelligence, distributed cognition, and phenomenal collective consciousness and substi-
tute rhetorical momentum for conceptual precision. We rst separate these notions. We then
construct a formal framework that isolates what is actually occurring when large popula-
tions are mediated by a shared generative model, identifying three disjoint recursion regimes
(training recursion, stylistic recursion, and cognitive recursion) whose evidence bases and
intervention points dier sharply. Using epistemic logic in the HalpernMoses tradition,
together with Aumann's agreement theorem, we show that AI-mediated populations exhibit
an ersatz form of common knowledge that we term pseudo-common belief : the operator
C is approximated by Ek for bounded k via a shared channel, producing the coordina-
tion consequences of common knowledge without its epistemic foundations. We derive a
distribution-shift upper bound on the homogenization of public expression under mixed
humanmodel corpora, empirically calibrated via simulation with sub-1% identiability of
the imitation-rate parameter. We then cast individual authorship as a signaling game and
derive an explicit pooling threshold β∗(γ, κ) = (Δc−κ)/(Δc−κ+γ2ΔUR) above which all
D1-stable perfect Bayesian equilibria pool, establishing a paradox of uency: better medi-
ators force pooling at lower mediation intensities. We close with an impossibility theorem
showing that no intervention preserving the receiver's information set can restore separating
equilibria in the pooling regime; epistemic provenance infrastructure is therefore the struc-
turally unique class of admissible solutions. We oer testable predictions and outline the
civic-design problem.