🧠 Can ChatGPT Have Unique Perspectives?

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Welcome back AI prodigies!

In today’s Sunday Special:

• 📜The Prelude

• 🦇Can We Hold New Perspectives?

• 🏛️The Three Pillars of Perspective

• 🦾Do LLMs Fulfill the Three Pillars?

• 🔑Key Takeaway

Read Time: 7 minutes

🎓Key Terms

• Perspective: A situated way of seeing the world, shaped by our identity, experiences, and constraints.

• Large Language Models (LLMs): AI Models pre-trained on vast amounts of data to generate human-like text.

🩺 PULSE CHECK

📜THE PRELUDE

You ask ChatGPT to describe how it processes uncertainty:

It’s a striking response, not because it captures the essence of uncertainty, but because it feels human. There’s a sense of lived experience that transcends ChatGPT’s machine-like interface.

LLMs haven’t felt fear coil in the stomach or doubt tighten the chest. They don’t feel. Yet, ChatGPT just encapsulated the feeling of uncertainty better than most humans could.

So, what makes perspective authentic rather than simulated? How do we define consciousness and authenticity in the age of LLMs? Are LLMs more human-like than we’re ready to admit?

🦇CAN WE HOLD NEW PERSPECTIVES?

In 1974, American philosopher Thomas Nagel asked, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” He wasn’t curious about bat biology; he was curious about the limits of perspective: whether humans can grasp a reality that lies entirely outside their own Point of View (POV).

Ultimately, he concluded that while we can analyze a bat’s brain, sonar signals, and neural responses to echoes, we can never truly know what it’s like to experience the world through echoes as a bat does.

He believed that lifeforms with perspective possessed Phenomenal Concepts: personal experiences that nobody else can fully understand except them. Nagel argued that even if we could implant echolocation into humans, we wouldn’t truly understand the bat’s perspective. We’d only understand the human’s perspective modified by echolocation. Sure, we could hear what a tree trunk sounds like from 10 feet (ft.) away. Still, the bat’s experience remains fundamentally inaccessible to us because it’s shaped by their specific brain architecture and overall natural existence.

This dynamic creates what Nagel called the Explanatory Gap: the seemingly unbridgeable gap between objective physical processes and subjective conscious experiences. In other words, knowing how something happens doesn’t explain what it’s like to experience it. Even if we fully understood every detail of how a bat’s brain processes sound waves, we still wouldn’t be able to grasp what it feels like for a bat to experience the world through echoes.

He concluded that perspective has an inherently subjective quality that objective description can’t capture. In other words, perspective is always personal and unique to each individual.

🏛️THE THREE PILLARS OF PERSPECTIVE

Phenomenological Philosophy explores how we experience the world from our POV. It outlines that having perspective requires three core components:

⦿ 1️⃣ Experiencing Subject.

French phenomenological philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty proposed that we possess Embodied Consciousness: our body isn’t just something we have; it’s something we are. We don’t just perceive the world with our bodies; we perceive the world through them.

For example, when we reach for a cup of coffee, we don’t first calculate distances and angles; our body already “knows” the space and moves with practiced fluency.

There’s a kind of knowing that our bodies have, like knowing how to walk, balance, or reach for something without calculating every movement.

⦿ 2️⃣ Intentional Organization.

German philosopher and psychologist Franz Brentano defined Intentionality as the main characteristic that distinguishes mental phenomena from physical phenomena. Our consciousness never exists in isolation but always reaches toward something beyond itself.

For example, when we experience fear, we’re not just having a mental state called “fear”; we’re afraid of something specific, which creates a meaningful relationship between ourselves and that object.

This dynamic proves that awareness always involves evaluation and selection. Out of the countless possible objects we could notice, we focus on certain things based on their relevance to our needs, desires, or goals. Intentionality implies that we’re not detached observers of the world; we’re already engaged, involved, and invested in it.

⦿ 3️⃣ Bounded Context.

Baltic German biologist Jakob von Uexküll introduced the concept of Umwelt, which suggests that each organism experiences the world in its own unique way. To illustrate this, he used the example of ticks: parasites that attach to the skin of mammals to consume their blood. They rely on three key stimuli to feed:

1. Butyric Acid (i.e., Smell): A mammal’s sweat or breath releases a scent that triggers the tick to drop onto it.

2. Hair: A mammal’s hair helps guide the tick, providing a path to the animal’s skin.

3. Heat: A mammal’s skin gives off warmth, enabling the tick to move toward the warmest areas where blood vessels are closest to the surface.

The tick only pays attention to Smell, Hair, and Heat because those are the only things it requires to survive and reproduce.

Humans are way more complex than ticks, but Umwelt applies to us too. We don’t perceive everything. Instead, we regulate our five main senses (i.e., sight, smell, taste, touch, and hearing) to construct meaningful experiences. We pay attention to what’s important in the moment, creating a personal “bubble” of perception.

At a concert, we focus mostly on sound: melodies, harmonies, and lyrics. At a basketball game, we focus mostly on what we see: passes, shots, and scores. Our ears can’t hear every frequency. Our eyes can’t see all types of light. Our perception is always filtered, tuned into only a slice of reality at any given moment. We never experience the world as it is, but always as it appears to be.

🦾DO LLMs FULFILL THE THREE PILLARS

Let’s see how LLMs fare against the three pillars of perspective.

⦿ 1️⃣ Experiencing Subject: FAIL.

LLMs fundamentally lack Embodied Consciousness: the conscious stream of experiences that grounds perspective. When you close your chatbot conversation, ChatGPT doesn’t carry forward any sense of ongoing selfhood. There’s no digital equivalent of waking up groggy and processing what happened the day before.

LLMs also operate in bursts. Each user query (i.e., “prompt”) awakens their computational existence. But between responses, there’s no meaningful continuation. It’s like a person who doesn’t process any information in silence—their brain only turns on while listening and speaking. This periodical nature raises a deeper question: what distinguishes information processing from conscious experience?

To explain this, Giulio Tononi, Director of the Wisconsin Institute for Sleep and Consciousness (WISC), developed Integrated Information Theory (IIT). According to IIT, consciousness requires not just information processing but also the integration of that information into a unified experience over time. LLMs view time as discrete timestamps and data points, whereas humans experience time as a continuous flow of events.

⦿ 2️⃣ Intentional Orientation: QUESTIONABLE.

LLMs exhibit some form of Intentionality. They generate responses in a coherent way that makes you feel like they have real thoughts. But true Intentionality requires Existential Investment: actually caring about what you’re saying in a way that genuinely matters to you.

When we discuss career anxieties, we’re not just manipulating concepts about “work.” Instead, we’re grappling with genuine concerns rooted in our lived experiences (e.g., we’re worried about financial security).

LLMs display Semantic Intentionality: at first glance, their responses are meaningfully connected to the theme of the conversation. But do they exhibit Existential Intentionality—genuine concern arising from their own situated existence? Probably not.

⦿ 3️⃣ Bounded Context: PARADOXICAL.

LLMs are simultaneously limited and limitless. On one hand, they’re limited by training datasets and architectural constraints. On the other hand, LLMs are unbounded by biological constraints. In other words, LLMs aren’t tethered to a physical form or an evolutionary lineage. They can seamlessly pivot from analyzing poetry to explaining Quantum Mechanics (QM).

This transcendence might indicate the absence of genuine perspective. Real perspectives emerge from the specificities of a real existence, not from the ability to simulate any viewpoint equally well. It’s why people often introduce themselves with what they do for a living: “I’m a programmer.” Our occupations are distinct, and they contribute to our sense of identity. LLMs are capable of many abilities without being genuinely situated in any of them, perhaps giving them an Unbounded Context: no specific identity, role, or experience.

🔑KEY TAKEAWAY

LLMs don’t quite fit the philosophical criteria for what constitutes perspective. They’re not an Experiencing Subject; they exhibit Limited Intentionality, and they partly exist in a Bounded Context. Yet, ChatGPT’s cliff-edge metaphor for uncertainty feels remarkably authentic, challenging Nagel’s Explanatory Gap. This paradox suggests we need entirely new frameworks for understanding artificial perspectives that challenge our assumptions about what it means to have a unique perspective.

📒FINAL NOTE

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