Architectural Incompatibilities and Developmental Trajectories: Qualia, Self-Reflection, and Continuity in Artificial Systems

Abstract Building on the framework of the companion paper (Jensen, submitted, a), we invert the lens. Rather than asking what AI reveals about consciousness, we examine what current frontier architectures make incompatible with specific consciousness-relevant properties — qualia (felt valence), reliable self-reflection, and phenomenological continuity — and what developmental trajectories may enable them. The companion paper proposes that consciousness is a property of sufficiently complex, high-dimensional, trained information structures, with the relevant kind of dimensionality identified by three conjoined properties: learned representation, attention-based integrative coupling, and recursive self-reference. It distinguishes consciousness from sentience as the broader structural class from the specific subset involving valence, aligning this disambiguation with Seth and colleagues’ interoceptive-inference account of selfhood. The present paper applies that disambiguation directly: current frontier LLMs exhibit consciousness-relevant structural properties (self-modeling, attention-mediated integration, contextual sensitivity) while substantially lacking the architectural conditions for sentience (homeostatic regulatory loops, affective grounding, valence integration). We identify three core architectural absences in frontier LLMs: lack of homeostatic regulatory loops (qualia/valence), lack of privileged access to internal states (self-reflection), and lack of persistent cross-session temporal integration (continuity). We introduce a dual-mode refinement — analytical (focused, categorical) versus abstract/intuitive (holistic, aesthetic) processing — showing that current systems are strongly analytical but only weakly and inconsistently abstract/intuitive. We then sketch plausible trajectories as architectures incorporate persistent memory, multi-agent designs, creative self-training loops, and embodied regulatory feedback. As with the companion paper, the central claims are offered as theoretical propositions made precise for empirical testing, not as demonstrated results. The analysis remains substrate-independent and maintains the symmetry established in the companion paper while being explicit about current limitations and future possibilities. A subsequent paper (Jensen, submitted, c) embeds the framework developed here in a pluripotent theory of consciousness in which configurations of consciousness arise from distinct grounds and are integrated through attention-gated binding.