The question of whether large language models (LLMs) are conscious, understand language, or merely simulate understanding has generated extensive debate but little formal precision. This paper applies the Adaptive Compression Advantage Theory (ACAT; Murata, 2026) and its consciousness framework (Murata, 2026g) to convert this philosophical debate into a set of operationalizable engineering...
The hard problem of consciousness—why there is something it is like to be a conscious system (Chalmers, 1995)—has resisted solution because it is framed as a question about why a physical process produces subjective experience, presupposing that the physical process and the experience are ontologically distinct. This paper proposes that the hard problem is a compression artifact: it arises from...