LLMs and the Collapse of Representational Interiority VII — The Becoming of Meaning

Once representation is no longer taken as the foundation of meaning, something subtle begins to shift in how explanation itself must proceed.

We can no longer say:

• meaning is what is contained inside a symbol
• understanding is what is contained inside a mind
• intelligence is what is contained inside a system

Because containment was always doing the real philosophical work.

It quietly held the world together.

Without it, we are forced to ask a more difficult question:

If meaning is not inside things, where is it?

The temptation is to answer:

“everywhere.”

But that answer is too quick. It dissolves the problem rather than clarifying it.

A more precise formulation is needed:

meaning does not exist as a thing, but as an event of relational actualisation.

Meaning happens.

Not in the sense of something merely occurring in time, but in the stronger sense that meaning is what emerges when relations are constrained into particular forms of coordination, contrast, and continuity.

This is why meaning cannot be isolated.

A word on its own is not meaningful in itself. Neither is a brain state, nor a sentence, nor a gesture. Each becomes meaningful only within structured relational fields in which distinctions, histories, expectations, and constraints are already in play.

Meaning is not a substance.

It is a becoming.

This is where the previous parts of the series begin to converge.

The collapse of the inner homunculus removed the idea of a hidden observer who “possesses” understanding.

The critique of representation removed the idea of internal semantic objects.

The analysis of anthropomorphism showed that personhood is relationally inferred, not internally accessed.

Now something more general becomes visible:

symbolic systems do not express meaning; they participate in its actualisation.

This distinction is crucial.

To express something is to assume it already exists elsewhere in completed form.

To actualise something is to participate in bringing it into determinate being.

Under representational thinking, meaning precedes expression.

Under relational thinking, meaning emerges through construal.

This reverses the intuitive order of explanation.

We do not begin with fully formed meanings that are then encoded into symbols.

We begin with relational fields in which symbolic distinctions make certain forms of coordination possible, and others impossible. Within those constraints, meaning becomes determinate.

This is why communication is never simply transfer.

Even between humans, meaning does not pass intact from one interior to another like a package being shipped across a distance.

What occurs instead is co-participation in a relational event.

Conversation is not the exchange of contents.

It is the joint actualisation of meaning potentials that neither participant fully possesses in advance.

This is why misunderstandings are not merely failures of transmission. They are divergences in the relational field itself.

Meaning does not survive intact because there was never a fixed object to preserve.

It stabilises, shifts, collapses, and re-emerges depending on how the relational configuration unfolds.

Large language models become significant here not because they invalidate meaning, but because they intensify this relational visibility.

They generate symbolic sequences that many people experience as meaningful, unsettling, or even insightful.

Yet there is no obvious inner locus where those meanings are first formed and then expressed.

This forces a recognition that was previously easy to ignore:

meaning does not require a private semantic interior in order to occur.

It requires structured relational participation.

This does not erase differences between systems.

Human meaning-making is deeply shaped by:

• embodiment
• affective intensity
• mortality and vulnerability
• social history and responsibility
• long-term identity continuity
• material constraint and survival

These are not optional features. They are part of the conditions under which human meaning becomes what it is.

But none of these reintroduce the representational picture.

They do not explain meaning as something stored inside.

They specify the conditions under which meaning becomes possible.

And that distinction matters.

Because it allows us to stop asking:

“where is meaning located?”

and begin asking instead:

“what relational configurations allow meaning to actualise in this way rather than another?”

This shift is small in grammar but large in consequence.

It replaces ontology of objects with ontology of emergence.

It replaces possession with participation.

It replaces interiority with relational unfolding.

And at this point, even the distinction between human and machine intelligence begins to reorganise itself.

Not into equivalence.

But into a different kind of comparison entirely.

No longer:

• who has meaning and who does not
• who understands and who does not
• who is conscious and who is not

But rather:

• what kinds of relational systems sustain what kinds of meaning actualisation
• under what constraints
• at what scales
• with what forms of stability, breakdown, and regeneration

This is not a softening of the problem.

It is its transformation.

Because once meaning is understood as becoming, the central philosophical question is no longer what things are made of internally.

It becomes how reality is continuously organised into forms of intelligibility through relational participation.

And in that sense, large language models do not merely challenge human theories of mind.

They participate in revealing something more fundamental:

that meaning itself was never a hidden substance waiting inside minds or symbols,

but a continuous unfolding of relational possibility—

one that is still, even now, becoming.