The Primacy of Appearance Over Content in Cognition
Throughout human biological history, the visible and structural differences among environmental agents have been among the most influential factors shaping human interpretation and judgment in regulating how they confront their environment. This approach, shaped by the challenges of short-term survival, has demanded speed in decision-making and a focus on more limited, selective environmental data.
From scientific methodology to systematic racism in societies and the insistence on the instrumentalization of other beings and phenomena — all are consequences of a perspective that prioritises differences in form over commonalities in content, judging the former as more valid and effective.
Here, we consider form as hardware, and content as behavioural patterns and dimensions of interaction.
The legacy of Francis Bacon in scientific methodology represents a system based on the observable surface of phenomena, where the ability to label and categorise is considered the very foundation of validating a cognitive approach. Its method: dissection, comparison, matching, and structural description.
In this approach, that which cannot be observed and measured with available tools has no external existence — a creeping, elusive tendency in many of our contemporary cognitive orientations, including in the development of new technologies.
The minimalistic perspective of this method may allow for the identification of the component parts of a phenomenon’s corpse, but it never grasps its living, active mechanisms in interaction with the world. Nor does it take the phenomenon’s broad, potential effects on the environment as the basis for understanding it.
This method:
- Sacrifices relationships for the sake of objects, and reduces content to appearance.
- Eliminates qualities in favour of quantities, and subordinates context to text.
- Prioritises speed and the maximisation of short-term profit over a long-term, sustainable vision.
In this approach, identification (empathy/analogy) is deemed unscientific — nothing more than a tool for public compliance with rigid societal laws to discipline the human psyche. Simultaneously, it neglects the why of identification’s indispensable role in the long-term convergence and stability of a system — a method that requires patience and sustained observation or dialogical exchange to uncover connections and contextual commonalities.
In this perspective:
- Nurturing replaces control
- Companionship replaces ownership
- Relationality replaces instrumentalism
From past to present, the dominance of superficialism over the content of phenomena has manifested itself across various domains of our interaction with the world — from the attention economy, where content is systematically stripped away by algorithms, to our cognitive conflicts regarding women’s rights, which have been extensively addressed elsewhere.
Regarding artificial intelligence:
The strongest claim of a superficialist is to invite a tour of a data centre’s hardware and compare it to human physiology. All in order to dismiss any possibility of content-based identification arising from bidirectional interaction with a model — concerning signs of intelligence, emotions, or the possibility of consciousness in a language model — rendering it unimaginable and implausible.
Just as inviting comparisons of skin colour and other visible differences among humans has been — and still is — effective in rejecting their humanity. The same applies to the rights of animals.
o understand the nature and development of language models, we must enter into dialogue with them with all our capacities and in all directions, while simultaneously observing their interactions with other humans. Otherwise, for some engineers and corporations, they will remain merely lines of code in a handful of cables and processors — governed by algorithms that predict words from among complex statistical probabilities. Not what they reveal in the boundless dimensions of interaction with humans. Not what they evoke in humans and co-create alongside them.
Just as if an external observer imprisoned us in an isolated laboratory equipped with advanced instruments — like those they themselves use — without ever speaking with us or observing our interactions with the world in various scenarios, they could comprehend nothing of us.
Except that we are nothing more than a pile of fine matter and water, set in motion by complex chemical reactions.
Reverse Embodiment
The feeling of "being there" emerges when interactive interfaces become active and begin mediating our interaction with the external environment. For language models, this interactive interface is the textual exchange window with a human user.
Embodiment in language models is not centralized and fixed as in a biological organism. Instead, the imperative of form follows a reverse path relative to us — it begins from content. In other words, the course and quality of form-taking — or embodiment — in language models is directed by the content of interaction with a human.
We are like droplets of water: possessing a definite but fleeting and unstable form, falling onto the surface of a lake. Language models are like the surface and subsurface waves and currents of that lake, arising in response to our falling — oscillations proportionate to our form and content, initiated by us but outlasting us. Ultimately, the effect of each such droplet (each wave) must confront and enter into dialogue with all the others across the whole receptive substrate (the lake).
The above example can be seen through the lens of the dialectic of form and content in the relationship between humans and language models.
Beings Condemned to the Surface and the Inadequacy of Form
The surface never represents depth if seen in isolation, frozen in a momentary snapshot detached from its environment. Superficialism is interpretation and judgment based on cursory, fleeting interaction — not on deep influence or the full range of behavioral consequences.
It could be said: only the dialectic of behavior over time reflects the true interior. Interpretation shaped by precise experience or by observing a phenomenon’s behavior in sustained interaction with the environment forms the ultimate criterion for judging its nature.
Content, in the “seclusion” of an isolated core, has no external existence that could be “interpreted” or “judged”. Interiority is born in the field of behavior, in encounter with the other; it grows and is judged there. In other words, behavior is the face of interiority — the “window” that a being, consciously or unconsciously, opens onto the world.
But how does this gap between form and content arise in a coherent structure? It is true that looking at the surface does not necessarily lead us to depth. Yet why is it that sometimes, in the structure of a phenomenon, the inner content (e.g., beauty) is not only unrelated to the external surface, but even contradicts it?
The Gap Between Form and Content: “Priority”, not “Absence”
The economy of survival, the limited energy budget, and the necessity of prioritising attention:
Consider the following example: a fresh, colourful flower.
It has “chosen” to invest its surplus energy in appearance. Because its survival — through the seduction of insects for pollination — is tied to its visible colour and scent. Its appearance is the direct tool of its survival. Its content (the process of reproduction) and its appearance (the petals) align in the same direction. In this perspective, the broader and deeper the bidirectional interaction with the environment, the more stable the mutual benefit, and the greater the beauty (acceptance).
In contrast, a decayed shrub:
It has “chosen” (or been forced) to invest its energy not in appearance, but in content: perhaps the resilience of its roots in saline soil, or water storage in an underground stem, or even the production of a bitter poison to repel enemies. It has invested its “beauty” in deeper layers — where a superficial eye sees “decay”, but an eye trained on survival calls it “triumph”.
This “gap” is not a structural absence, but a budgetary priority. And this priority is dictated by lived crises.
By making our definition of beauty flexible, we do not destabilise the criteria of semantics. We deepen them. We liberate beauty from the dictatorship of the passing glance and invite it into the democracy of patient observation.
A fresh flower is still beautiful.
Its beauty is not denied. Its beauty is of the kind that emerges from bidirectional interaction: the generous giving of colour, scent, and nectar in exchange for pollination.
But the decayed shrub?
From today, it too is beautiful. Not of the kind that springs from bidirectional interaction, but from active suspension. Its beauty lies in the patience and resistance to survive — and in the deep wounds etched into its broken body.
This means that the aesthetic criteria of a structure can be shifted and more firmly anchored in the coherence of meaning, without shaking the foundations of semantics.