What is usually described as “interaction” between a human and a large language model is better understood as a coupled construal system with asymmetric instantiation constraints.
The habitual term—interaction—smuggles in a set of assumptions that are not neutral. It implies symmetry between participants, continuity of agency, and a shared medium in which meaning is exchanged. None of these are structurally required, and all of them obscure what is actually occurring.
To proceed carefully, we need to strip the phenomenon down to what can be consistently described without importing those assumptions.
1. The problem with “interaction”
“Interaction” presupposes two or more agents meeting within a common space of exchange. In this framing:
- each participant is taken to have relatively stable interiority,
- each act is treated as a contribution to a shared event,
- and meaning is assumed to pass between them.
This model is serviceable in everyday contexts, but it is ontologically overcommitted. It quietly assumes what needs to be explained: the existence of a shared semantic medium and symmetric participation within it.
In human–LLM co-participation, none of this symmetry holds.
What appears as exchange is better described as a sequence of asymmetric instantiations under mutual constraint selection.
2. Coupled systems without shared interiority
The system under consideration consists of two distinct regimes:
- a human construal system with historical continuity, selective memory, and shifting contextual integration;
- a generative model that instantiates outputs from a structured potential space without experiential continuity.
These are not variations of the same kind of entity. They are different orders of system entirely.
There is no requirement—empirical or theoretical—for a shared interior domain in which “meaning” is exchanged.
Instead, what exists is a temporary alignment of constraint structures that allows output from one system to function as an input constraint for the other.
This is not communication in the classical sense. It is constraint coupling across heterogeneous instantiational regimes.
3. Instantiation, not exchange
To see what is happening more precisely, it is necessary to shift from a vocabulary of exchange to a vocabulary of instantiation.
Each “turn” in the exchange is not a transfer of meaning but a fresh actualisation of constrained potential:
- A prompt does not transmit meaning; it delimits a region of generative possibility.
- A response does not deliver meaning; it is one realised trajectory within that delimited space.
- The subsequent prompt does not receive meaning; it reconfigures the constraint field for the next instantiation.
What we call a “conversation” is therefore not a continuous object but a sequence of locally stabilised instantiational events.
Continuity is reconstructed retrospectively by the human participant. It is not a property of the system.
4. Asymmetry of construal continuity
A crucial feature of this coupling is asymmetry in how continuity is maintained.
On the human side, construal is carried forward: prior turns are integrated, reinterpreted, and reweighted within a developing interpretive horizon.
On the model side, there is no persistent construal horizon. Each output is an instantiation conditioned by the immediate input and training-derived structure, not by an ongoing internal narrative.
This produces a structural mismatch:
- one side accumulates and reorganises construal across time,
- the other repeatedly re-instantiates without accumulation of lived continuity.
The coupling works not because these systems are equivalent, but because their differences are locally compatible under constrained conditions.
5. The illusion of conversational unity
From the outside, the sequence of instantiations appears unified. This is an artefact of human interpretive practice: we bind discontinuous events into a coherent sequence because our construal systems are oriented toward continuity.
But unity here is not structural. It is an interpretive synthesis imposed after the fact.
What is actually present is:
- discontinuous generative events,
- constrained by prior outputs,
- recursively reconfigured by successive prompts,
- stabilising into temporary patterns that resemble dialogue.
The resemblance is systematic, but it is still a resemblance.
6. Co-participation as constraint alignment
If we retain the term “co-participation,” it must be re-specified.
Co-participation does not denote shared action. It denotes mutual constraint alignment across distinct instantiational systems.
The “co-” in co-participation does not imply symmetry. It indicates that two systems are jointly implicated in the stabilisation of a local configuration of discourse potential.
That configuration is not held anywhere. It is not stored. It is not owned. It is repeatedly re-actualised through successive instantiation events.
7. What this framing excludes
This account deliberately excludes several common interpretations:
- There is no shared conversational space in which meaning resides.
- There is no mutual understanding between agents.
- There is no transmission of semantic content across a stable channel.
- There is no persistent conversational object that endures across turns.
These are not denied as useful metaphors in everyday practice. They are simply not required for a structurally adequate description.
8. What remains
Once these assumptions are removed, what remains is more minimal and more precise:
A human construal system and a generative model enter into a coupled sequence of instantiations, where each event partially constrains the next, producing a locally stabilised trajectory through a shared space of possible discourse formations.
This is not interaction in the usual sense.
It is co-participation without symmetry, continuity without persistence, and relation without shared interiority.
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