The Mapmaker’s Axiom: A Critical Note on Lerchner’s “The Abstraction Fallacy…"

This critical note examines Alexander Lerchner's "The Abstraction Fallacy…" (2026), which holds that artificial systems can simulate but not instantiate consciousness. Without defending the strong functionalism Lerchner attacks, I argue that his conclusion is settled in advance by stipulation: although the paper promises to demand no biological credentials, from the outset it defines concept possession as a "neurophysiological state" and abstraction as a "costly metabolic process," closing the debate before opening it. Three lines of criticism follow. First, Lerchner's broadly Humean account of abstraction rests on conveniently sensory examples ("pain," "red," "whale") that exclude machines for lacking senses rather than for any inability to abstract. Second, his "mapmaker" argument oscillates between continuous physics and the syntactic manipulation of discrete vehicles, while the mapmaker's external function is symmetric across humans and machines. Third, his metabolic reading of Leibniz's mill leaves unexplained what would turn a mechanical mill into a metabolic one.