Perfectum Esse and Machine Consciousness: A Scholastic Alternative to Computational Functionalism

The binary framing of the machine-consciousness debate—either a system's fluent first-person discourse expresses a conscious act or is mere output—is insufficient. Recovering the scholastic verbum tradition's concept of perfectum esse, the 'completed being' of a word in its going-forth, the authors apply this third ontological standing to large language model outputs. Four structural postulates, supported by mechanistic interpretability and conceptual-art certificate practice, articulate this category. The model's utterance is an authorized going-forth, neither conscious act nor mere output. This analysis explains the unreliability of machine self-report, relocates attribution and answerability from consciousness to derivation, and leaves phenomenality untouched.

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Abstract

The machine-consciousness debate, as fixed by Chalmers's assessment and the Butlin-Long indicator-properties program, proceeds under computational functionalism as a working hypothesis and produces a binary result: a system's fluent first-person discourse is either the expression of a conscious act, or mere output. We argue that the binary fails to exhaust the subject. Instead, we recover from the scholastic verbum tradition a third ontological standing, perfectum esse, the "completed being" of a word in its going-forth, a category we apply directly to the conversational output of large language models. We derive four structural postulates to articulate the category, with support from mechanistic interpretability, and from conceptual-art certificate practice as an example of authorized derivation. The model's utterance is thus an authorized going-forth, neither conscious act nor mere output. Our analysis explains the unreliability of machine self-report, relocates attribution and answerability from consciousness to derivation, and leaves phenomenality untouched.