Can LLMs do participatory knowing in any sense?

[u/depressed_genie]

The phenomenological tradition has a precise vocabulary for the layers of knowing that lie underneath propositional report. Merleau-Ponty on the body schema and the perceived world; Heidegger on the equipmental whole and being-in-the-world; Thompson and Di Paolo on enactive cognition; Gallagher on the body in social interaction. All of them converge on the claim that knowing is constituted by an agent's relation to a world they bodily inhabit. The current AI moment is a stress test for that tradition. LLMs produce text that imitates the outputs of participatory knowers without engaging any of the structures that make participatory knowing possible. The question is whether the imitation can ever amount to the real thing, or whether the gap is constitutive.

I recently gave a talk at the 6th International Conference on Philosophy of Mind in Porto applying the phenomenological frame to the LLM debate. You can watch it here.

The reading goes through four levels of knowing: propositional, procedural, perspectival, participatory. Propositional is what the table is. Procedural is how to ride a bicycle, with the live know-how the riding requires. Perspectival is the first-person take from inside a situation, with its solicitations and affordances. Participatory is the agent-environment coupling itself, the optimal grip the agent finds in moving through the world, the way one's existence is at stake in what one does. LLMs occupy the propositional layer, with statistically conditioned access to records of agents who knew in all four. The system has a map of our map, without the world the maps depict. This is the constitutive reading: meaning is grounded in the stakes of being embedded in the world, and a system with no stakes can produce fluent reference to meaning without instantiating any.

If the constitutive reading is right, the productive question is which thinkers in the tradition have done the most rigorous work on the irreducibility of participatory knowing to its propositional residue. Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger are the obvious starts; Thompson and Di Paolo extend it into enactivism; Sheets-Johnstone has done work on the kinaesthetic ground of meaning. Where in the literature do you think the strongest argument for the irreducibility lives?

[u/Even-Adeptness6382]

I wonder whether the procedural and participatory levels are as separable as the schema suggests. Merleau-Ponty’s motor intentionality deliberately collapses them.

I’d argue the strongest case for irreducibility lives in Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of the phantom limb, precisely because it shows that participatory knowing is stakes in a specific bodily history, not just embodiment. That’s harder to dissolve into propositional residue than almost anything else in the tradition.

[u/Far-Tune-9464 → u/Even-Adeptness6382]

Being is a verb, after all.

[u/DeliciousPie9855]

I read some of Sheets-Johnstone’s work and found it fascinating.

I think both Heidegger and Merleau Ponty still give the most defence of its irreducibility, largely because they refuse to make their writing overly clear or accessible. Of course all writing should be maximally clear, but sometimes a complex idea, even clearly put, remains irreducibly complex. There’s a hostile tendency toward simplifying things to the point of distortion, and I think even modern interpretations of great phenomenological thought risk falling prey to this tendency.

I think also some mystical and poetic though has this kind of built-in to it. Modernist poetry and the theories behind modernist poetry in the early twentieth century is kind of obsessed with this idea of the irreducibly complex reality of sensory experience, and sets itself the project of trying to reproduce that irreducibly complex and rich sensory reality via language. The main booby trap these theorists warn against is language’s tendency to revert to the propositional, and for the propositional to kind of usurp the narrative a bit.

[u/worldofsimulacra]

For irreducibility specifically? Lacan. LLMs operate fully within an artificial analogue of the symbolic register and cannot be a subject proper. They show clearly that language itself is machinic and interfaced with in deterministic, probabilistic ways; however without embodiment and subjectivity they cannot even know what a terrain is at all, let alone the qualia of the specific terrains their limited datasets point at, let alone the 99.999...% of subjectivity that forever remains terra incognita, never defined or articulated. We are at that strange point in history where we've made a very impressive toy/tool and are simultaneously entrenching it into culture via our misrecognition of it as being something other than what it is.