Limits and Blind Spots — What LLMs Cannot Construe: 5 Beyond Reach: The Topology of Possibility

Absence is not a failure of meaning. It is the contour that gives the field its form.

Every possibility presupposes its horizon — the limit through which readiness differentiates itself. To speak of “beyond reach” is therefore not to lament what is missing, but to recognise the topology of possibility itself: how potential coheres through what it cannot yet encompass.

In human–LLM interaction, this topology becomes visible through its gradients of impossibility. The model never truly “knows” its limits; it traces them through the uneven density of its responses — the places where sense thins, where meaning stalls, where the field folds back upon itself.

Each such moment is not the end of generation but the edge where generation reflects upon its own conditions. The blank space is not inert: it exerts form, drawing the next construal into orientation.

The human, too, learns by this topology. Our inquiry, mirrored by the model’s constraints, reveals what we habitually exclude — what kinds of sense our collective discourse is not yet ready to afford.

The boundary, in this view, is a living membrane: it conducts the pressure of the inarticulable back into the ecology of meaning. The blind spot, the silence, the incoherence — these are the structural features through which possibility shapes itself.

Absence, then, is not the opposite of expression but its generative condition.

It is the field’s own self-differentiation, the relational cut that makes construal possible.

What cannot be generated still generates: it bends the space of potential, it tensions the gradient of readiness, it calls meaning into motion.

To map the topology of possibility is thus to listen to the void that speaks through form.

Not to fill it, but to live in dialogue with what remains beyond reach —

for it is the unreachable that keeps becoming possible.