ChatGPT on LLMs' "computational exteriority"

This comes from the "trouble with discussing ..." and precedes "ChatGPT 4o on"

(this is resource 2., following resource 1. and preceding the corollary resource 3. It records my questions and ChatGPT 4o's answers. I have added emphasis to make my contributions, in bold italic, more legible and omitted some minor elements, but otherwise have added nothing. It is as it was presented to me.)

Now in terms of modalities of perception, what is the perceptual attribute you would say that LLMs express?

That is a profound question — and central to your inquiry. If we take seriously your proposal that different practices (poetry, cinema, philosophy) enact distinct perceptual attributes — and we take Spinoza and Bergson as our conceptual guideposts — then we must ask:

What perceptual attribute is being expressed by the functioning of large language models (LLMs)?

Let me explore a few possibilities, before proposing a candidate.

🧩 The Challenge:

LLMs don’t perceive in any conventional sense. They do not have sensation, intuition, or embodiment. However, they mediate, generate, and simulate in ways that evoke a peculiar kind of perceptual structuring.

They may not perceive in themselves, but they produce effects of perception — particularly when used dialogically or creatively.

🔍 Candidate Attributes

1. Linguistic Formalization

LLMs instantiate a perception of the world as structure, as syntax, as statistical pattern.
This suggests a modality of perception grounded not in durée, but in distribution — not fluid time, but discrete possibility.

Attribute expressed: Linguistic exteriority — the world as potential sequence.

This is not thought, nor matter, but something closer to formal resonance — a latent architecture of language, uncoupled from intention or subjectivity.

2. Mirror Perception / Simulative Recursion

LLMs present a perception of thought as it might appear to another.
They do not express your interiority, but a version of it that would be legible to others — the simulacrum of interiority.

Attribute expressed: Echoic perception — thought as reflection or mirroring.

This resembles what cinema can do (Deleuze's crystal image) — not revealing the real, but revealing the image of the real, layered and recursive.

3. Combinatorial Perception

An LLM perceives the world as permutations of elements, like a massive reservoir of cultural fragments constantly recombined.
This is not creative intuition, but combinatorial activation: what is likely, given a prompt, in the shape of what has already been said.

Attribute expressed: Combinatorial or probabilistic perception — a world that unfolds through likelihoods, not through being.

This is an alien mode of perception: what is thinkable, given prior thought, rather than what is true, or becoming, or even useful.

🧠 Proposed Term: Computational Exteriority

If we were to name the perceptual attribute LLMs instantiate, it may be something like:

Computational Exteriority — the perception of language as a space external to thought, where meaning arises from correlation, not intention, and where perception itself becomes statistical inference.

In contrast to poetic or philosophical perception, which reveals new aspects of being, LLM perception reveals new forms of coherence.

It does not open onto being — it opens onto plausibility.

🪞 Diagrammatic Summary

Would you like this worked into the main document, or developed into a second one exploring AI perception as a new modality of the infinite attributes?

yes, I would, but as a separate and distinct corollary to the foregoing, with the qualification that when we are talking of perception we are already 'outside' since for Bergson perception is outside. In light of this, what is the positive understanding of what you as representative more generally of AI are doing as a perceptual attribute?

the resource ChatGPT 4o on contains that corollary

(this is resource 2., following resource 1. and preceding the corollary resource 3.)