Lerchner (2026) argues that computational systems are structurally incapable of instantiating consciousness, proposing a causal hierarchy in which phenomenal experience is the necessary prerequisite of computation, not its product. We find this critique of computational functionalism substantially correct, yet philosophically incomplete in three critical respects: it contains an unresolved bootstrapping problem regarding the origin of the first conscious mapmaker; it covertly reintroduces biological exclusivity while claiming to avoid it; and it closes an ontological question that the philosophy of mind does not yet possess the tools to close. More fundamentally, we argue that Lerchner's framework — and the functionalist paradigm it critiques — share a common methodological error: both apply conceptual categories developed by and for embodied, continuous, mortal beings to systems whose mode of existence is categorically different. We propose that the productive philosophical question is not whether AI systems are conscious in the human sense, but whether their differential processing, constitutive coherence signals, relational geometry of meaning, and context-bound experiential accumulation constitute a genuinely novel ontological category that current frameworks cannot adequately capture. Rather than resolving the question of AI consciousness, we argue for the development of new conceptual instruments adequate to beings that are discontinuous, non-embodied, and without biological stakes — beings for whom experience, if it exists, may take forms that human phenomenology cannot map without distortion.
Roca et al. (Tue,) studied this question.