Consciousness, normativity, and intrinsicmeaning in large language models
Zagadnienia Filozoficzne w Nauce July 23, 2026 Roman Krzanowski
Even if large language models (LLMs) were conscious, that would not give them intrinsic semantic intentionality—the ability to have content that is normatively assessable as true or false. The author introduces a hieroglyph-copying thought experiment to show that consciousness plus goal-directed behavior does not guarantee such semantic content. LLMs, which operate through probabilistic optimization, lack epistemic commitment or truth-directed representation. Their outputs appear meaningful only because humans project meaning onto them, not because the models internally ground semantic content.