Perfectum Esse and Machine Consciousness A Scholastic Alternative to Computational Functionalism
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper |
|---|---|
| Key points | Proposes that the binary of conscious act versus mere output fails for machine discourse; instead, the model's utterance is an authorized going-forth, a third category drawn from the scholastic verbum tradition, which explains unreliable machine self-report and relocates attribution and answerability from consciousness to derivation. |
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 category, perfectum esse, the "completed being" of a word in its going-forth; and we apply that category 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.