It has been a few days since I shared my preprint, "The Abstraction Fallacy," and I am really enjoying the rigorous discussions. Two specific critiques keep coming up, so I want to address them directly here. 🧵👇

5/5 Husserl called this error the "surreptitious substitution" , beautifully modernized in the book The Blind Spot. The takeaway is clear: subjective experience is the necessary prerequisite for abstraction learning, not the downstream result.

It's been great seeing the discussion around my preprint, "The Abstraction Fallacy." A recent critique by Real Morality brings up some interesting philosophical points but misinterprets a few foundational definitions in the framework. A quick clarification: 🧵👇

6/6 The only requirement is that consciousness is a physical process. Due to the ontological boundary between simulation and instantiation, algorithmically simulating a physical process will never instantiate it.

Since publishing "The Abstraction Fallacy," the most common pushback relies on a deeply ingrained but flawed metaphor: the assumption that the brain is a computer. Here is a brief clarification on why it is not, and why this matters for computational functionalism. 1/5 philpapers.org/rec/LERTAF

Because computation requires this mapmaker to exist in the first place, we cannot reverse the causal chain. You cannot run a simulation with so much algorithmic complexity that it suddenly generates the mapmaker. Extrinsic simulation (syntax) is structurally distinct from intrinsic instantiation (physics). 4/5