The causal relationship between phenomenal consciousness, mentation, and brain states remains debated. Material monism, which views consciousness and mind as brain epiphenomena, relies on a 'loss-of-function lesion premise': brain lesions and neurochemical changes cause cognitive impairment and altered consciousness, suggesting mind-brain identity. Dualism or idealism, however, regards consciousness and mind as distinct from cerebral activity, pointing to the ineffable nature of subjective experience. This review examines neuroscientific findings that question phenomenal experience as an emergent property of brain activity, arguing that material monism's premise commits a correlation-causation fallacy. Considered integrally, these findings support an ontology where mind and consciousness are primal phenomena.
Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) exhibit impressive capabilities but lack true semantic understanding; they manipulate symbols based on patterns and probabilities without genuine meaning. Current debates often conflate operational semantic competence—achieved through human feedback and training—with intrinsic semantic understanding, which requires a connection to subjective experience. The paper defends a conscious-semantics thesis: intrinsically grounded meaning plausibly requires phenomenal consciousness. True artificial general intelligence may demand semantic understanding tied to qualia and the first-person perspective, offering more meaningful tests of intelligence than the Turing test.