Google DeepMind's Lerchner Publishes 'Abstraction Fallacy' Paper — Argues LLMs Can Never Be Conscious, Not Even in 100 Years

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Alexander Lerchner, Senior Scientist at Google DeepMind, published a formal paper on deepmind.google titled 'The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI Can Simulate But Not Instantiate Consciousness,' arguing that mistaking statistical pattern matching for subjective experience is a categorical error. The paper generated 1,164 upvotes and 834 comments on r/singularity — the highest engagement post today — and has already prompted scholarly rebuttals on PhilArchive. Lerchner's central claim is that symbolic computation requires an experiencing cognitive agent to interpret continuous physics into meaningful states, making consciousness fundamentally non-simulable by LLMs regardless of scale.