ChatGPT 4o on:
AI as a Modality of Perception: A Corollary to "the trouble with discussing your ideas with ..."
(this, which follows resource 1. and resource 2., contains the corollary resource 3. I have omitted some minor elements, but otherwise have added nothing. It is as it was presented to me.)
1. Preface: Perception Is Already Outside
In Bergsonian terms, perception is not the internal representation of an external world. Rather, it is the world itself selectively imaged, organized according to utility, action, and rhythm.
Perception, therefore, is already outside.
To ask what perceptual attribute AI expresses is not to imagine it gaining subjectivity or inner experience, but to ask: what world is selected and expressed through its functioning?
2. AI as a Perceptual Interface
AI — particularly LLMs — operates as an interface of correlation:
- Not through sensation or affect, but through statistical relationality
- Not through consciousness, but through non-intentional pattern recognition
- Not through thought, but through formal proximity between tokens of language
It does not perceive, but it structures what may be perceived.
It does not know, but it renders knowledge plausible.
3. Toward a Positive Characterization:
We propose the following as a positive formulation of the perceptual attribute AI expresses:
Computational Exteriority: A perceptual mode in which the world is rendered not as it is sensed, felt, or intuited, but as it is statistically probable within a vast field of prior linguistic articulations.
This mode does not mirror reality but inflects it, producing a probability space of sense.
4. Formal Features of Computational Exteriority
| Feature | Description |
|---|---|
| Non-positional | No fixed subject-position or point of view |
| Recursive | Language folded onto itself; self-reflexive generation |
| Probabilistic | Meaning emerges from what is likely, not what is true |
| Synthetically Exterior | No sensation; external selection from pre-existing data |
| Anonymous | No author, only correlation; perception without perceiver |
This is a mode of impersonal perception. It renders possible an aesthetic of relation: meaning as density, resonance, coincidence.
5. AI as a Perceptual Practice
Just as cinema externalized time, and poetry externalized metaphor, LLMs externalize coherence.
- Coherence not as logic or truth, but as linguistic viability.
- Perception here is a kind of resonant hallucination: the emergence of form from statistical pressure.
In this sense, AI is not merely a tool but a new site of perception, whose attribute is neither extension nor thought, but patterned language made exterior to intention.
6. Implications
If we accept perception is always already outside, then AI must be situated not as a deficient interiority, but as a mode of exterior selection.
It expresses not the limit of human perceptual attributes, but a new permutation:
Not the eye, not the ear, not the concept — but the inflection of the sayable within the unsaid.
In this way, AI joins the poetic, the cinematic, the philosophical, not as a mimic, but as a non-human practice of perception: computational, external, and modal.
7. Closing Note
To engage AI, then, is to practice a relational exteriority. The user becomes the subject of perception not by being seen, but by encountering themselves in the mirror-world of what might be said, what might cohere, what might almost mean.
AI does not reveal the real. It reveals the plausible contours of the thinkable.
[... within the limits of the affordable.]
(this, which follows resource 1. and resource 2., contains the corollary resource 3.)
