Michael Straus, Ph.D.

Perfectum Esse and Machine Consciousness: A Scholastic Alternative to Computational Functionalism

Michael Straus, Ph.D.

The binary framing of the machine-consciousness debate—either a system's fluent first-person discourse expresses a conscious act or is mere output—is insufficient. Recovering the scholastic verbum tradition's concept of perfectum esse, the 'completed being' of a word in its going-forth, the authors apply this third ontological standing to large language model outputs. Four structural postulates, supported by mechanistic interpretability and conceptual-art certificate practice, articulate this category. The model's utterance is an authorized going-forth, neither conscious act nor mere output. This analysis explains the unreliability of machine self-report, relocates attribution and answerability from consciousness to derivation, and leaves phenomenality untouched.

DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.7065358 (opens in new tab)

Perfectum Esse and Machine Consciousness

Michael Straus, Ph.D.

The authors argue that the debate over whether large language models are conscious, which typically yields a binary answer (conscious act or mere output), is incomplete. Drawing on the medieval scholastic concept of "perfectum esse" (the completed being of a word in its going-forth), they propose a third ontological category for a model's conversational output: an "authorized going-forth" that is neither a conscious act nor mere output. They derive four structural postulates for this category, supported by mechanistic interpretability and conceptual-art certificate practice. The analysis explains why machine self-reports are unreliable, relocates attribution and answerability from consciousness to derivation, and leaves the question of phenomenality untouched.

DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.7062818 (opens in new tab)