A Comment on the Abstraction Fallacy Why AI Can Simulate But Not Instantiate Consciousness

Alexander Lerchner's The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI Can Simulate But Not Instantiate Consciousness offers a forceful critique of computational functionalism. Its central claim is that symbolic computation is not an intrinsic physical process but a mapmaker-dependent abstraction imposed upon continuous physical dynamics. On this basis, Lerchner distinguishes simulation, understood as syntactic manipulation of physical vehicles according to an externally imposed map, from instantiation, understood as the realisation of the intrinsic constitutive dynamics of a phenomenon itself. This commentary argues that the paper identifies a genuine and important weakness in substrate-independent computationalism, but that its negative conclusion requires a positive theory of the kinds of physical organisation capable of instantiating phenomenal presence. I propose that the Experiential Coherence Framework (ECF) provides such a candidate theory. ECF agrees that abstract computation, considered merely as symbol manipulation, is insufficient for consciousness. However, it reframes the problem not as a choice between digital syntax and biological exclusivity, but as the search for intrinsic, temporally extended, mutually constraining, globally integrated coherence dynamics. On this view, the decisive question is not whether a system implements an abstract computation, but whether it realises a field of reach, yield, memory, and presentation whose coherence regulation is intrinsic rather than externally assigned. ECF therefore preserves Lerchner's critique of the abstraction fallacy while resisting the stronger inference that artificial consciousness is impossible in principle. The result is a middle path: computation alone cannot instantiate consciousness, but artificial systems may be conscious if their physical organisation satisfies structural-phenomenal conditions that are not reducible to syntactic architecture.