This is why, at Absentia, we treat consciousness as a distraction rather than a destination. We do not need our systems to be conscious for them to perform cognitive work at or beyond the human level, and conflating the two is a mistake, not an insight.

They run on living tissue that is active every instant the animal is alive, continuously firing, continuously modulated by the world around it, never left decoupled from reality the way a trained model is, because a nervous system on pause is the end of that intelligence, an extreme surprise, in Friston’s terms, from which there is no return.