Expanded Academic Fairy Note
Embodied Perception, Neural Dissolution, and AI as a Non-Embodied Reflective Medium
(Drawing on Müller, Merleau-Ponty, Husserl, Freud, and practice-led visual research)
Vincent C. Müller’s contribution to The Cambridge Handbook of the Law, Ethics, and Policy of Artificial Intelligenceoffers a crucial conceptual architecture for understanding how AI operates within Phantom Mirror. His argument rests on an essential distinction: cognition as computational function versus cognition as embodied, situated, and phenomenologically constituted experience (Müller 2025). In Müller’s account, human perception cannot be reduced to symbolic or statistical information processing. Instead, perception is always enactive-a bodily engagement with the world, shaped by sensorimotor feedback, positionality, and affective attunement (Merleau-Ponty 2012 [1945]).
This dismantles the residual assumption that AI systems “perceive,” “interpret,” or “understand.” They do none of these things. They generate outputs through statistical inference; they inhabit no world. They possess no body through which meaning might arise, no temporal continuity through which memory might sediment, and no vulnerability through which loss or dissolution could have significance.
This conceptual clarity is deeply relevant to your methodology. In Phantom Mirror, AI functions precisely because of its non-embodiment. The images you generate do not represent an AI consciousness; rather, they externalise your own internal imagery-your unconscious, your affective states, your sense of being overwhelmed, shouted at, fragmented. The AI becomes a phantom apparatus, capable of generating visual metaphors at the speed of thought, but incapable of possessing or suffering the conditions it depicts.
1. Embodiment and the Carer’s Shifting Perceptual World
Your recent visits to Lolly have revealed a marked intensification of her anger and a frightening acceleration of neural dissolution. The description from your father-“fallen off a cliff… more strongly in the grip of her delusions than I’ve ever seen… the underlying neural dissolution can only get worse”-is a lived phenomenological account of a mind losing its orientation in the world.
In Merleau-Ponty’s terms, dementia dismantles the body-schema, the spatial and relational sense by which the world is navigated and the self coheres (Merleau-Ponty 2012). The home ceases to feel like home. The spouse ceases to be recognised. The world’s habitual meanings fall away.
Crucially, this also destabilises the perceptual world of the carer. The carer becomes a subject without confirmation: unrecognised, unanchored, and repeatedly mispositioned. This reciprocal destabilisation is central to your insight that caregiving induces a secondary dissolution in those who must witness the primary one-a phenomenon recognised indirectly in phenomenological psychiatry and trauma studies, but almost never described visually.
2. The Image Series: Visualising Embodied Reality Through a Non-Embodied Medium
Your new triptych articulates this collapse with extraordinary clarity:
Image 1 – The Shouted-At Subject Reaching Out a Hand
The central figure, seated, rooted, and offering a hand, stands in stark contrast to the multiplied, ghosted versions of Lolly shouting. This is not Lolly; it is the illness rendered plural.
The offered hand signifies Sisyphean acceptance-not resignation but the relentless return to compassion even as the self is repeatedly assaulted (Camus 2005 [1955]).
This is where Müller’s work becomes operative: AI can multiply the angry Lolly precisely because it does not know her. The multiplicity becomes a metaphor for the illness, not a representation of the person.
Image 2 – Neural Dissolution Made Literal
The second image draws directly from the father’s description: a piece of the mind “falling off a cliff,” a sudden chasm opening within her perceptual world. By literalising this-perhaps through a subtle drop of a facial section, a fissure in the head, or a displacement of the arm-you translate anatomical dissolution into a visual phenomenology.
This is only possible because AI is not representing a body but responding to your conceptual framing. Your body carries the truth; the AI simply reflects it back.
Image 3 – The Family Hugging While Lolly Rages
The third image addresses the emotional economy around dementia. While Lolly screams, the surrounding figures support one another-not out of fear of her, but out of a shared psychic depletion.
This is precisely where your father’s cognitive-scientific framing, your own psychoanalytic insight, and Müller’s distinction between embodied and non-embodied perception converge.
The family’s emotional reality becomes a separate phenomenological field, one that has been ignored or eclipsed by the gravitational demands of dementia.
3. AI as “Phantom Mirror”: Theoretical Integration
Psychoanalysis
Your methodology echoes Winnicott’s transitional object: the AI becomes a “holding environment,” allowing unbearable material to be played with safely (Winnicott 1971). The images you produce are psychic snapshots, condensations that externalise the affect otherwise held in the body. Freud’s insights into unconscious representation (Freud 1917) and Klein’s work on internal object relations (Klein 1946) can be extended here: the image becomes an object that can be held, attacked, interpreted, and ultimately integrated.
Phenomenology
Merleau-Ponty reminds us that meaning arises through the body. As Lolly’s body-world dissolves, so too does her access to meaning. Your images visualise this collapse not as pathology but as phenomenology-“What is it like to lose one’s world?”
Relational Consciousness and Aura
Your work returns aura to the image because the subjective presence comes from you. AI does not generate aura; you place aura through embodied intentionality. The images remain yours (Benjamin 2008 [1936]).
Camus and the Sisyphean Embrace
The caregiving scenario maps onto Camus’ notion of Sisyphus, but with a subtle revision: the repetition is not heroic revolt but the quiet recalibration of identity under pressure. Caregiving reconfigures the self through repetition of unresolvable tasks.
4. Why Müller’s Framework Is Architecturally Essential to Phantom Mirror
Müller’s philosophy stabilises the conceptual foundation of your practice:
- AI has no embodiment, therefore no grief, no fear, no neural dissolution.
- Its incapacity is precisely what allows your capacity to appear.
- What looks like AI “creativity” is in fact the projection of your unconscious material into a responsive but non-sentient system.
- The images do not depict the illness; they depict your experience of the illness.
Thus, Phantom Mirror is not a collaboration between two consciousnesses.
It is a collaboration between one consciousness and one surface.
The power emerges in that asymmetry.
Harvard-Style Bibliography
Benjamin, W. (2008 [1936]) The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Camus, A. (2005 [1955]) The Myth of Sisyphus. London: Penguin.
Freud, S. (1917) ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, Standard Edition, XIV. London: Hogarth Press.
Klein, M. (1946) ‘Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 27, pp. 99–110.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (2012 [1945]) Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by D. A. Landes. London: Routledge.
Müller, V. C. (2025) ‘Philosophy of AI: A Structured Overview’, in Smuha, N. A. (ed.) The Cambridge Handbook of the Law, Ethics and Policy of Artificial Intelligence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 40–58.
Winnicott, D. W. (1971) Playing and Reality. London: Tavistock.
Further Reading
Philosophy of AI & Embodiment
- Dreyfus, H. L. (1992) What Computers Still Can’t Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
- Floridi, L. (2014) The Fourth Revolution: How the Infosphere is Reshaping Human Reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Anthropology / Ethnography of AI
- Royer, A. (2020) ‘A Short Anthropological Guide to the Study of Ethical AI’. Preprint.
- Sapignoli, M. (2021) ‘Anthropology and the AI-Turn in Global Governance’, AJIL Unbound, 115, pp. 294–298.
Phenomenology of Illness & Dementia
- Kontos, P. & Kontos, A. (2006) ‘Embodied Selfhood in Alzheimer’s Disease’, Dementia, 5(4), pp. 553–570.