The Phenomenal Illusion of LLMs: Consciousness, Linguistic Zombies, and the Limits of Discursive Plausibility
Alfredo Vannacci preprint
Large Language Models (LLMs) produce text that articulates the vocabulary of inner life (expressions of emotion, simulations of uncertainty, introspective hedging, confessional registers) with a fluency previously confined to conscious beings. This paper identifies and analyzes the phenomenal illusion: the systematic phenomenon whereby the discursive plausibility of such outputs is perceived by...