experience

As Merleau-Ponty writes in Phenomenology of Perception , “The body is our general medium for having a world.” To flatten these moments into language is already to lose something: the texture, the weight, the sensation of being in the world. Friend seems to forget that experience is not just textual, it is highly highly highly sensual.

But experience is much more. The philosophical discipline of phenomenology is helpful here, especially in the tradition of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who reminds us that perception precedes articulation, or, in other words, that we do not merely think our way through the world, we live it through our bodies. The body is the very condition of... See more

This is the promise, and perhaps the tyranny, of the language age: that all experience can be rendered as text. First we had text, then hypertext, and now megatext , if you will. That’s the world large language models operate in. Everything must be made legible to the machine. And legibility, here, is evidently linguistic.