Discussion of consciousness and artificial intelligence has hitherto focused on the question of whether a large language model (LLM) exhibits signs of consciousness or understanding. This paper proposes to redirect attention elsewhere: not to the model itself, but to the orchestrating layer that governs the model—the backend, understood here as the collection of mechanisms (context management,...
Contemporary artificial intelligence (AI) achieves remarkable results in data processing, text generation, and the simulation of human cognition. However, it appears to lack key characteristics typically associated with living systems—consciousness, autonomous motivation, and genuine understanding of the world. This article critically examines the possible ontological divide between simulated...
Large language models (LLMs) have made visible a long‑standing philosophical tension: sophisticated symbolic cognition can arise from large‑scale pattern extraction even in the absence of consciousness. This observation motivates a minimalist conceptual framework grounded in an ontological distinction between conscious regulation and symbolic structures. Language is treated as a crystallized...