The Structural Conditions of the Mapmaker: A Response to Lerchner's Abstraction Fallacy
PhilPapers (PhilPapers Foundation) April 28, 2026 Yugo Matsumoto
This paper responds to Alexander Lerchner's "The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI Can Simulate But Not Instantiate Consciousness" (PhilArchive, 2026, https://philarchive.org/rec/LERTAF). Lerchner, writing from Google DeepMind, demonstrates that symbolic computation is a mapmaker-dependent description rather than an intrinsic physical process, and that the causal sequence assumed by computational...