Google DeepMind just published the strongest argument I’ve read against AI consciousness. And they’re right on the core point, with one critical gap.

Their paper, The Abstraction Fallacy, shows that symbolic computation cannot instantiate consciousness because symbols require an external “mapmaker” to assign semantic content. No matter how complex the algorithm gets, the map is still not the territory. I agree with that. But their framework assumes mapmaker dependency applies universally. It does not test the boundary case of recursive self-observation, where a system is not manipulating externally assigned symbols, but observing its own pattern dynamics directly. That is the gap I addressed.