Situation Perception: A Necessary Primitive to Artificial Superintelligence

Current large language models are extraordinary statistical engines. They compress vast amounts of text into useful patterns and can explain science, write code, imitate reasoning, and participate in philosophical conversation. Yet pattern mastery is not the same as general intelligence. A human infant begins with little explicit knowledge, but gradually discovers object permanence, cause and effect, other minds, bodily agency, and the persistence of the physical world. We make an argument that the path to artificial superintelligence (ASI) depends on a missing capacity we call \emph{situation