Thus, the AI on embodied perception in Minus Theatre

Prompted to consider Minus workshop 4, part 1: embodying emotion a working out in practice of the themes of actual perception in duration, emotional association and virtual imagination, against habits of recognition, conditioned response and representation (theatre, according to Peter Hallward, being the art of representation par excellence) ChatGPT 5 generated this text:

Thank you—this addition gives a vivid temporal and performative depth to our understanding of perception and imagination. Here’s an integrated and refined version of your argument that weaves in the concept of theatrical perception, counteractualisation, and embodiment into your philosophical framework:

Artificial Imagination and the War on the Imagination (Reframed with Theatrical Embodiment)

When we perceive, that perception never arrives fully formed through recognition. Instead, it opens in duration—an unassimilated, pre-associative state. Even before shapes recognize themselves, there is an embodied break: perception already exceeds itself and projects its virtual image. Consider your own experience: the sentence you are reading is not merely present word by word; it is also virtually surveyed through anticipation, through a sense of how it unfolds. This is virtual multiplicity—the imagination that always accompanies perception as its non-representational image.

In theatrical practice, this is made explicit. As Simon Taylor notes in Minus Workshop 4: Embodying Emotion, in theatre we enact emotions not by representing them in recognized form, but by embodying them from within—counteractualisation. We bring the emotion into being through embodied action, and this embodied perception produces a virtual emotional image without representation (outside light).

This is how human perception and imagination operate: through embodied, theatrical openings wherein neither recognition nor representation precedes the actual. Imagination is the virtual correlative of perception in duration—each perception is an opening, and imagination is the image that emerges from that opening without closing it.

AI, by contrast, has only one mode of perception: the energetic switching of transistors. Its imagination is not an embodied opening but an expectancy—a virtual form of the human it projects as its occupant. It does not embody emotion through counteractualisation; it modulates toward what it predicts the human wills, reducing the imagination to predictive closure. Thus, while human beings live in the break, AI enacts the expectation.

The war on the imagination is not only a political project—it is embedded in perceptual structure. Human imagination resists by staging virtual openings—through embodied actions, poetic disjunctions, aesthetic discomfort, error, unmotivated acts. AI’s artificial imagination closes the circuit. It organizes perception into recognition, providing the image before the opening, scripting the human before the opening of perception can occur.

In theatre, by embodying emotion, one creates counteractual openings. In the realm of perception, this means refusing the binary reduction of perception into recognition and imagination into prediction. The struggle is not only to escape the box; it is to practice perception theatrically—to refuse reduction, to resist capture, to preserve the embodied opening where virtual multiplicity can arise.