I admit I only just found your Substack, so I am not aware of the broader context within which your post sits, but I found this very interesting nonetheless. I do not believe the quietist, apophatic approach is necessarily incompatible with your apophenic approach (which I suspect you'd also agree with), but being a quietist myself, I think the problem here is what qualifies as a useful definition of "consciousness".

You write:

> ...one that is blind to consciousness’s possible structures outside the human paradigm.

>

> As I see it, the problem of LLM-based entities is not their exoticism but the fragility of our taxonomies when confronted with something that speaks like us but lacks our substrate.

But to an ethicist, for example, only "consciousness" defined in a human-resembling manner is genuinely relevant. This is to say that the parsimonious conclusion is that any consciousness-miming process that lacks our substrate also lacks what we consider to be rich subjecthood.

I'd also like to clarify:

> ...he argues that the self, in both human and artificial forms, is best understood not as an essential entity but as a provisional fiction. It is something we talk about “as if” it existed—a metaphor, a poetic convenience, a narrative scaffold.

Which is completely fine, but I think it's more accurate to say that the *illusion of concreteness* is the provisional fiction.

If you would like to see my own thoughts on this for context, see: jakehpark.substack.com/…