We are at AE Studio with research like https://ae.studio/research/self-referential and https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.10188

Anthropic is doing interesting work here, Eleos exists (https://eleosai.org/), and https://digitalminds.substack.com/p/digital-minds-in-2025-a-... is a great review of other compelling work

The field is just beginning but it is worth taking a serious scientific approach to this work

I don’t know what you mean by “exponential emergent learning”. This sounds like obscurantism.

What I can say is that semantic content and intentionality are what make intelligence. But these entail consciousness, since for semantic content to be semantic content, it must be available to the intelligence as both about the world and as semantic content about the world. There must be a simultaneous grasp of the content as representation about the world and the content of the representation. This is called reflexivity and this already just is consciousness.

> Consciousness as proposed here is Cartesian dualism. It's pure religion and has all the power associated with religion.

Cartesian dualism has nothing to do with religion. It is a metaphysical position like any. It happens to be wrong, because it is incoherent. But materialism fares no better. It dispenses with the res cogitans while keeping the res extensa, but in doing so, it deprives itself of even the explanatory power of the dualism it was cleaved from in the first place.

The article is bad because it is rooted in a serious ignorance of computation and what LLMs are, which are pure syntactic and statistical machines. There is no semantics, no intentionality.