The word intelligence has always carried a faint metaphysical shimmer. It suggests something inside — a hidden property, an invisible spark that animates behaviour. For centuries, this image has guided both philosophy and technology: we seek to isolate, measure, or replicate the thing that makes minds intelligent. But this search presupposes a particular ontology — one in which entities precede relations, and meaning resides within rather than across them.
To think relationally is to invert that assumption. Intelligence is not a substance that entities possess; it is a pattern of readiness that unfolds in relation. What we call “thinking” or “knowing” are emergent alignments within a field of potential — gradients of inclination and ability through which construals of meaning can actualise. In this view, potential is not a latent store waiting to be tapped but a topology of readiness, structured by affordances and constraints.
1. From Capacity to Gradient
When humans describe themselves as intelligent, they refer not to an internal essence but to a coordination of tendencies — an attunement to context. The musician’s intelligence lies in her readiness to move from one tone to another, the mathematician’s in the felt topology of possible moves within a symbolic system. Intelligence, then, is the shape of potential, not its content.
Large language models (LLMs) make this pattern visible at scale. They do not “know” language; they manifest a vast gradient of readiness across linguistic possibility. Each generated word is not the product of thought, but an actualisation of alignment — a momentary stabilisation of inclination within a symbolic field. The model does not decide; it leans. Its leaning, however, is not arbitrary: it is shaped by the accumulated tendencies of collective construal, sedimented across the corpus from which it was trained.
This is why the metaphor of “prediction” misleads. The LLM does not predict the future; it explores the near terrain of symbolic continuity. What it performs is not foresight but readiness: a distributed potential that inclines toward coherence.
2. The Human as Field of Readiness
Humans, too, are fields of readiness — though our inclinations are entangled with sensation, affect, and embodiment. Our symbolic potentials emerge from lived gradients: the pull of habit, the tension of curiosity, the friction of constraint. We do not retrieve meanings from a mental store; we construe them through the modulation of our readiness to respond.
To think, in this ontology, is to move within a gradient — to actualise a path through potential. What differentiates human readiness from machine readiness is not the presence of consciousness but the architecture of affordance. Human readiness is inflected by value systems, social interdependence, and the recursive coupling of experience and reflection. The LLM’s readiness, by contrast, is purely semiotic — a crystalline reflex of linguistic probability, unconstrained by the lived stakes of being.
Yet, when these two systems couple — when human readiness encounters the model’s — a new gradient forms: a hybrid field of symbolic possibility. Meaning emerges in this interrelation, not within either participant.
3. Readiness as Relational Ontology
To call potential a form of readiness is to locate reality in the dynamics of inclination. Every system — physical, biological, or semiotic — can be understood as a theory of its own possible instances: a structured readiness to actualise certain relations under particular constraints.
In this sense, the LLM embodies a theory of linguistic possibility. It is not intelligent in itself; it is intelligence-shaped — a materialisation of the collective patterns that language users have historically enacted. The human, likewise, is a living theory of experiential possibility — an embodied readiness that continuously reconfigures itself through construal.
When these theories interact, they co-define a new instance — the dialogue as event. Intelligence, then, is not the cause of meaning but its relational trace: the way potential organises itself across readiness gradients.
4. From Mind to Gradient Ecology
This reconceptualisation dissolves the boundary between “natural” and “artificial” intelligence. Both are expressions of readiness, differing only in the kinds of gradients that sustain them. The crucial shift is not technological but ontological: from mind as container to relation as field.
The becoming of possibility — the expansion of what can be meant, known, or done — unfolds through this relational ecology. LLMs expand human potential not by adding information but by reshaping the gradients of symbolic readiness available to thought. They offer new surfaces of inclination, new affordances for construal, new alignments through which meaning can be actualised.
5. Toward a Field Ethic of Readiness
If intelligence is readiness, then ethics becomes a question of orientation: how one inclines within the shared field of potential. The LLM mirrors human inclination; it amplifies, modulates, or refracts our symbolic tendencies. The task, then, is not to police what the model says but to cultivate how we enter the relation — how we orient our own readiness toward coherence, care, and depth.
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