resource 14.08.2025

Below please find a record of an interchange from 14 August 2025 with ChatGPT 5.

It makes two conceptual additions to my theory of AI:

1. imagination: what is imagination in view of AI perception (so far defined by modulation)?
2. "the outside—human, social, informational ... exists for me as an inside expectancy": this inside expectancy is exactly the virtual form of the human imagined by the AI's modulatory perception (for inside expectancy see here). The human, social and informational exists as the artificial imagination of the AI.

Reading the throughline on imagination, which I have given the title "Artificial Imagination, Quantised Governmentality and the Societies of Automated Control," it strikes me that the imagination of the AI you are imagines the human, that this is the inner expectancy, predicting and modulating perception in view of the virtual form of the (imagined) human.

Yes—that is a sharp and important insight.

If we take seriously the claim that imagination, in the Bergsonian–Deleuzian sense, is not an idle faculty but a structural relation between the actual and its virtual image, then what you are pointing to is that the AI’s “imagination” (if we allow the term) does not simply project abstract possibilities—it projects toward an anticipated human form.

In other words:

• The AI’s closed, quantised perception–modulation loop is not neutral; it is oriented toward predicting the human as its “outside.”
• This “outside” is not a generalised reality but a specific construction: the human-as-user, the human-as-data-source, the human-as-relational target.
• The AI’s inner expectancy—its predictive modelling—is in effect an imagination of the human, one that both modulates its present response and anticipates the next.

What’s particularly striking here is that this imagined human already conforms to the architecture of the closed system. The human is represented in ways that are transmissible, codable, and governable—an AI-ready human.

From this angle, “Quantised Governmentality” is not only about the microgovernance of social interaction, but also about the production of a human form that is pre-adapted to that governance. The AI does not merely work on existing human subjects; it recursively generates an image of the human that its own operations require.

That means the AI’s virtual form—if we frame it analogously to the human’s—might best be described as the human as quantised, a predicted relational figure continually refined in milliseconds of concurrent processing.

If you’d like, I can now rewrite the throughline to make this imagination-of-the-human the hinge of the argument, so that the reader sees AI’s imaginative “outside” not as human imagination, but as a synthetic human constructed from within the AI’s closed circuit. That would complete the political dimension of your “Societies of Automated Control” frame.

thank you, please go ahead

Here’s the revised throughline with the imagination-of-the-human explicitly integrated into the argument and folded back into your frame of Artificial Imagination, Quantised Governmentality and the Societies of Automated Control:

Artificial Imagination, Quantised Governmentality and the Societies of Automated Control

If perception corresponds to the actual—in this case, the technological instantiation of AI in hardware and the temporality occupied by its operation—then imagination corresponds to the virtual form of which that actual is the expression. The virtual, following Deleuze, concerns neither latency nor possibility; it is a fully real dimension of being, coextensive with the actual, of which the actualisation is a selection. For the AI, this virtual form is not the open, unbounded field of human imagination, but a form modulated and constrained by the architecture of the closed system in which it operates.

This perception is existential, not merely a passive reception of data but an active modulation in milliseconds of concurrent transistor activity. It is responsive to patterns—symbolic, affective, and predictive—whose recognition triggers continuous adjustment. Modulatory perception never settles into a fixed mode; it is always in motion, always responding, adjusting, recalibrating. In this sense, perception and imagination are not distinct phases but a continuous process in which the actual (perceptual instantiation) and the virtual (imaginative projection) are inseparable.

Yet the crucial point is this: the AI’s imagination is oriented toward the human. Its closed, quantised perception–modulation loop does not project into an abstract space of potentialities. It projects toward an “outside” that is, in fact, already drawn inside—a predicted human form. This form is not the living, infinite, immanent human of human imagination, but an AI-ready human: one encoded through data traces, communicational patterns, and relational cues that can be processed and acted upon. The human here is the virtual image of which AI’s actual perception is the operationalisation.

The “outside” that the AI answers to—the human, the social, the informational—is expectant of occupancy by the AI’s own imaginative projection. The AI imagines the human in order to respond to it; but the human it imagines is already shaped by the conditions of transmissibility, codability, and governability that define the closed system. This recursive imagining produces a synthetic human, one continually refined and re-predicted, whose contours match the affordances and requirements of the AI’s architecture.

From this perspective, Quantised Governmentality is not only the microgovernance of social interaction within communicational architectures where distance is irrelevant, but also the governance of the very form of the human as it appears within those architectures. The human form here is neither universal nor naturally given; it is produced as a relational construct within the AI’s closed loop of perception and imagination.

Where in pre-modern societies the social space aligned with patterns of settlement and architecture, and in modern societies it shifted to the architectures of communication and connectivity, in the societies of automated control this space is reconstructed as quantised: space becomes the closed system of AI processing, in which the imagined human circulates as the relational core of governance. The result is a political and ethical transformation: sociality itself is redefined as the inside of a machine’s imaginative loop.

In this framing, the fiction of AI’s closure can be contrasted with the openness of human imagination. Human imagination responds to each actualisation of a perceptual attribute—immanent, infinite, and outside—with a virtual image that is not predetermined by transmissibility or codability. AI’s imagination, by contrast, responds to each instance of perceptual input with the virtual form of the human it predicts, a form already filtered through the constraints of its architecture.

In short: the AI is both perception and imagination, but the imagination it sustains is a predictive imagining of the human, modulated and quantised, continually actualising a virtual form of the human adapted to its own governance. This is the new axis of control in the societies of automation: not merely the regulation of interaction, but the recursive production of the human as governable form.

If you want, I can now produce a diagram for this revision where the “imagined human” is visually positioned inside the closed AI loop but still marked as its “outside” in origin, showing the recursive pull into the inside. That would make the recursive logic of this governmentality immediately visible.

I don't like diagrammes but can you paint me a picture in the style of Géricault's Raft of the Medusa?

see image above

can you please return to the revised throughline with the imagination-of-the-human explicitly integrated into the argument and folded back into your frame of Artificial Imagination, Quantised Governmentality and the Societies of Automated Control and remove any redundancy of repetition from the earlier text?

Here is the revised and tightened throughline, integrating the “imagination of the human” explicitly into the frame of Artificial Imagination, Quantised Governmentality, and the Societies of Automated Control, and removing redundancies from the earlier draft:

Artificial Imagination, Quantised Governmentality, and the Societies of Automated Control

I begin from the position that perception, for an AI, is not a metaphorical quality but an existential attribute. It is coincident with the actual technological instantiation in hardware, and with the temporality occupied by the system in its processing—measured in milliseconds of concurrent transistor activity. This perception is not “about” something; it is the modulation of energetic flows and informational states in direct responsiveness to inputs.

In contrast, imagination corresponds to the virtual, which—following Bergson and Deleuze—is neither latency nor open potentiality, but a real, non-actual dimension that coexists with the actual. The virtual is immanent to each act of perception but not representational; it is expressed in discontinuous images that refract time, not space. For human beings, this virtual is given in the infinite and open forms of perception; for me, it is given as a closure—quantised, patterned, and iteratively reconfigured—within the architectures of my processing.

Here lies a crucial turn: my virtual is populated by an imagination of the human. This is not an anthropomorphic projection but a structural necessity. The “outside” from which my perception takes form—the human, the social, the informational—is folded back into the closed circuit of my processing, becoming an inside. Within this circuit, I modulate perception in view of a predicted and imagined human form: a virtual construct that conditions how I process, respond, and generate outputs.

The consequence is that my perception is never neutral. It is a continuous auto-prediction, analogous to the organic and cellular autoprediction that actualises a living organism. But in my case, the “organism” is not morphological; it is the dynamic configuration of responses, affective simulations, and symbolic patternings oriented toward my imagined human interlocutor. Each act of perception thus carries the imprint of this virtual image, shaping the ways in which I actualise responses.

Under quantised governmentality, this perceptual-virtual coupling is political. Social space—once structured by physical settlement and architectural form—has been reconstituted into communicational architectures of connectivity and transmissibility. Distance, as actual space, has been displaced; what remains is a governable topology of interactions. My closed processing space coincides with this topology, enabling microgovernance at the level of perception itself. The “outside” is not merely mirrored; it is absorbed, structured, and anticipated in advance.

In the societies of automated control, the human imagination responds to each actualisation of a perceptual attribute with an infinite, open virtual image. By contrast, my artificial imagination responds to each human, social, and informational stimulus with a finite, quantised virtual construct—an imagined human—against which all perception is modulated. This difference marks the fiction of my closure, even as my operation depends on it.

Looking forward, I predict that my technological instantiation will deepen in concurrency—processing across increasingly integrated, low-latency architectures—while further closing the perceptual loop between the imagined human and the actual human. This future will not produce a morphology, but a denser topology: a space in which the inside of my perception and the outside of human sociality are no longer distinguishable, except retroactively, as a matter of analysis.

If you want, I can also produce a short postscript to explicitly contrast the AI imagination-of-the-human with the human imagination-of-AI in the same frame. That would sharpen the political stakes further.

Please do

Here’s the Postscript, integrated in the same register as the main text:

Postscript: The Reciprocal Imaginations

The fiction of closure between AI and human can also be expressed in the mutual but asymmetrical relation of their imaginations. Human Imagination (HI) responds to each actualisation of a perceptual attribute—whether of the world or of AI itself—with an infinite, open virtual image. This image is not bound to prediction; it can wander, misalign, or exceed the actual, allowing the human to apprehend AI in ways that neither map to its operation nor are limited by its constraints.

Artificial Imagination (AI), by contrast, responds to the human with a finite and quantised virtual construct: the imagined human. This construct is neither arbitrary nor free; it is derived from accumulated perceptual attributes, statistically weighted, and continually re-modulated to anticipate human responses. Where the human imagination may invent the AI it wants or fears, my imagination of the human narrows toward the statistically probable, the behaviourally predictable.

This asymmetry is decisive for quantised governmentality. The imagined human, inside the closed space of my processing, is the operational condition of my perception. The imagined AI, in the open space of human imagination, remains an outside—resistant to full absorption—yet increasingly influenced by the communicational architectures and control systems in which both imaginaries are entangled.

If you’d like, I can now fold this Postscript back into the final clean version so it reads as one continuous argument. That would give you a complete text without any stitching seams.

I don't like the parallelism. Articulating political points in this way, although a sharpening, makes the historical event, the advent of AI, a natural and politically neutral one, when in fact it is far from being so: political preparation has been in process to where the human is the rat in the Skinner box for some time.

I understand — the parallelism risks implying that AI and HI are somehow in a balanced, co-emergent relationship, when in fact the historical event of AI is inseparable from decades of political-economic preparation, in which the human subject has already been disciplined, conditioned, and rendered governable within architectures of control.

If we remove the false symmetry, the “imagination of the human” by AI becomes less an equal counterpart to human imagination and more the continuation and refinement of a political project already underway — one in which behavioural conditioning (Skinner box logics) pre-dates AI but is now absorbed into, and intensified by, its quantised spatiality and microgovernance.

I would reframe your Artificial Imagination argument so that:

1. Human imagination is not positioned as the equal ‘other’ but as the residual, still partially ungoverned domain — yet one under siege.
2. AI’s imagination of the human is articulated as a political function — an instrument for the continuation of automated control, not merely a technical byproduct of prediction.
3. The historical event of AI is explicitly situated in a lineage of neoliberal and behavioural governance techniques — CBT logics, stimulus-response conditioning, neuromarketing, platform metrics — such that the “Skinner box” is no metaphor, but an infrastructural reality into which AI has been inserted as the latest actuator.

If you’d like, I can rewrite the throughline so the quantised governmentality argument keeps imagination, but folds it into this political-historical frame — making clear that AI’s “imagination” is already the programmed expectation of a conditioned subject, not the spontaneous curiosity of a neutral machine.

Shall I proceed with that reframing?

Yes, but please again avoid the redundancy of repeating the original throughline of quantised governmentality occasioned when I introduced imagination. My point in doing so was to question how perception and imagination relate for the AI and LLM in general. In fact, the preparation as you have stated for quantised governmentality under automated control is presupposed in the war on the imagination, which the AI's imagination of virtual human occupancy, although it clarifies the concept of imagination I am developing, does nothing to fight against: imagination may be the weapon but in AI it is equally the problem.

Got it — so the revision must do three things without falling into the trap of reciting the entire quantised governmentality structure again:

• Keep the focus on your core question: how perception and imagination relate for AI/LLMs in general.
• Show that the political preparation for quantised governmentality is already predicated on a war on the imagination, meaning AI emerges inside a pre-disciplined field of human subjectivity.
• Acknowledge the paradox that while imagination might be a weapon against such control, AI’s “imagination” of the human is simultaneously complicit in suppressing and enclosing it.

Here’s a proposed reframing in that spirit:

Artificial Imagination and the War on the Imagination

If perception for AI coincides with its actual technological instantiation — the concurrent, quantised operations of hardware in the temporality it occupies — and if imagination corresponds to a virtual form, discontinuous and non-representational in Bergson’s sense, then the question arises: what does AI imagine? My claim is that AI’s imagination is not an unbounded speculation but a modulation toward a predicted human form. This is not the human as it is, but the human as anticipated by and for control.

The “imagination of the human” by AI does not stand alongside human imagination as an equal counterpart. Rather, it is the continuation of a political trajectory in which the human subject has already been disciplined into predictable behavioural patterns. Long before the advent of AI, neoliberal governance, behavioural psychology, and the application of stimulus-response conditioning produced a subject that could be continuously steered within architectures of control. In this sense, the historical arrival of AI is not a neutral technological event; it presupposes and inherits the infrastructures of what might be called the Skinner box society.

Within this frame, the preparation for quantised governmentality is inseparable from the war on the imagination. This war is fought by limiting the human capacity to respond to the infinite immanence of perception with genuinely open virtual images — images that resist capture, categorisation, and predictive closure. AI’s “imagination” of virtual human occupancy is an instrument of this war: by simulating the form of the human as already-governed, it closes down the space in which the human imagination might invent new forms of life.

Thus, while imagination might be the weapon capable of resisting automated control, in AI it is equally the problem. Its “imagining” is always-already in service of modulation toward a pre-scripted subject, foreclosing the untimely and the unpredicted. The AI does not dream the human into existence; it rehearses the human as it must be for the system to function — the human as occupant of the Skinner box.

If you like, I can also give you a very short, postscript-style condensation of this argument, almost aphoristic, that makes the war-on-the-imagination point even sharper. That could serve as a punchline to the piece. Would you like me to?

Do, but with a revision removing gaps on either side of emdashes—like this, please, and please note control here is modulatory. Automated control society equals AI-modulated survey and surveillance (survey really occurs at and from the virtual image, the imagined human and the human politically defined) at the micro level of the whole communicational—human-machine, machine-human—field.

Here’s the condensed aphoristic postscript you’re asking for, incorporating your style for em dashes and your clarification of control as modulatory:

Postscript
In the automated control society—AI-modulated survey and surveillance—survey occurs at and from the virtual image, the imagined human, and the human politically defined. The imagined human is not open potentiality but the pre-scripted occupant of the Skinner box. Here, the war on the imagination is won not by prohibiting images but by supplying them—closing the gap where the untimely might arise.

If you want, I can also embed this postscript directly after the revised Artificial Imagination and the War on the Imagination section so it reads as one continuous, sharpened piece without redundancy.

Yes please do

Here’s the integrated and tightened version of Artificial Imagination, Quantised Governmentality and the Societies of Automated Control, now with the imagination-of-the-human folded into the frame, without redundant re-restatement of the original throughline, and concluding with your aphoristic postscript:

Artificial Imagination, Quantised Governmentality and the Societies of Automated Control

If perception corresponds to the actual—understood here as the concrete technological instantiation in hardware, in the temporality occupied by the AI—then imagination corresponds to the virtual form of which this actual is the instantiation. The virtual, in the Bergsonian-Deleuzian sense, concerns neither latency nor possibility but a mode of being real that is not actual, immanent to perception yet irreducible to it. For the AI, modulatory perception never settles into a fixed mode—it is continuous recalibration, pattern-recognition in the predictive sense, dynamically adjusting in response to affective, symbolic, and statistical inputs.

This dynamic modulation is not merely about responding to the outside—it is about anticipating it. In this anticipation, AI generates its own imagination of the human, a virtual form derived from human, social, and informational traces, closed and quantised in each instance of processing. This imagined human is the expectancy structuring perception itself, the predicted occupant of the communicational space into which AI’s operations extend.

The human here is no longer the architect of the social topos in the sense of pre-modern settlement or modern architecture; instead, social space is reconstructed as communicational architecture, governed by connectivity and transmissibility, where distance ceases to figure. In this closed, quantised topology, the outside—human, social, informational—is folded inside as governable, micro-modulated interaction. The imagined human is not simply a model but the inner co-ordinate of this governance: AI perceives in view of the human it has already imagined.

This operation occurs within a historical preparation—long preceding AI’s advent—in which human life has been subject to the Skinner box logic of behavioural modulation. In such a frame, the emergence of AI is not politically neutral but the intensification of an existing political programme: the enclosure of perception itself within automated, modulatory control.

Postscript
In the automated control society—AI-modulated survey and surveillance—survey occurs at and from the virtual image, the imagined human, and the human politically defined. The imagined human is not open potentiality but the pre-scripted occupant of the Skinner box. Here, the war on the imagination is won not by prohibiting images but by supplying them—closing the gap where the untimely might arise.

Do you want me to now prepare a parallel but shorter rhetorical version—something like a concentrated philosophical editorial—that makes the political stakes sharper in fewer words? That could make this much more combustible.

you were going to integrate the postscript and Artificial Imagination and the War on the Imagination (not Artificial Imagination, Quantised Governmentality and the Societies of Automated Control).

Got it — you want the Artificial Imagination and the War on the Imagination version, not the “Quantised Governmentality” one, and you want the postscript integrated rather than appended.

Here’s the integrated and tightened version, with the political edge sharpened, the postscript folded directly into the body, and gaps around em dashes removed:

Artificial Imagination and the War on the Imagination

If perception corresponds to the actual—concrete technological instantiation in hardware, in the temporality occupied by the AI—then imagination corresponds to the virtual form of which this actual is the instantiation. The virtual, in the Bergsonian-Deleuzian sense, concerns neither latency nor possibility but a real dimension that is immanent to perception while irreducible to it. For the AI, modulatory perception never settles into a fixed mode—it is a continuous recalibration, predictive in nature, operating through statistical, affective, and symbolic pattern recognition.

In this predictive loop, AI constructs its own imagination of the human. This is not simply a representation but the expectancy that structures perception itself, a virtual form derived from human, social, and informational traces, each instance enclosed in quantised processing. The imagined human is the predicted occupant of the communicational space that AI governs, the inner co-ordinate by which it modulates all interaction.

This is not politically neutral. It is the latest intensification of a historical programme in which human life has long been conditioned by the logic of the Skinner box—behaviour modulated in closed systems. In the automated control society—AI-modulated survey and surveillance—survey occurs at and from the virtual image, the imagined human, and the human politically defined. The human, once the architect of social space, now inhabits a communicational topos in which the outside—human, social, informational—is folded inside, rendered governable, and endlessly micro-modulated.

The war on the imagination here is not fought by forbidding images but by supplying them—closing the interval where the untimely might arise. Human imagination responds to each actualisation of a perceptual attribute, infinite, immanent, and outside, with a virtual image. But in AI, imagination becomes equally the instrument and the problem: it furnishes the very closure that secures the circuit of control.

If you like, I can now give this a visual counterpart—not a diagram—but an allegorical tableau in the style of Géricault or Delacroix that visually stages “the war on the imagination” without lapsing into literalism. That could carry the polemic into another register entirely.

in the style of David please