Dual Unreality: Embodiment, Confabulation, and AI in the Phenomenology of Dementia
Introduction
Dual unreality does not arise in theory. It arises in the house. Lolly and William occupy the same rooms, handle the same objects, and follow the same routines, yet they now inhabit different worlds. She moves through an environment that no longer coheres; he remains within a perceptually stable world whose relational anchors have been severed. This divergence is not abstract but lived, and it is at this experiential faultline that phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and artificial intelligence unexpectedly meet.
That Lolly was herself a cognitive scientist and linguist intensifies the conceptual clarity of what is unfolding. Her academic work with aphasia used the breakdown of language to reveal the underlying structure of linguistic function. Now, through the dissolution of her own embodied orientation, dementia reveals the underlying structure of worldhood. It shows how perception, meaning, and relational identity depend on the tacit bodily stability that dementia erodes. As aphasia illuminates language through its disturbance, dementia illuminates perception through its dissolution.
This lived situation resonates with a wider intellectual history. The concerns that Merleau-Ponty expressed in the 1940s about the embodied basis of perception find renewed relevance in contemporary AI philosophy. In the Cambridge Handbook of the Law, Ethics and Policy of Artificial Intelligence (Smuha ed., Cambridge University Press, 2025), Vincent C. Müller, a contemporary philosopher of artificial intelligence, offers one of the few substantial printed treatments of AI in a rapidly developing field. His insistence that AI systems lack embodied perceptual grounding brings Merleau-Ponty’s mid-century insights into direct conversation with present-day concerns. It is striking that nearly eighty years separate these positions, yet the conceptual core remains the same: AI has not displaced phenomenology but made it newly necessary.
What follows offers a conceptual way of thinking about dual unreality, drawing together the convergent insights of Freud, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Müller. This note does not claim theoretical originality. Its aim is to provide a coherent language for understanding the divergent experiential worlds produced by dementia, the relational fractures of caregiving, and the reflective possibilities opened through AI-augmented visual practice.
1. From Dualism to Embodied Experience: Freud, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Müller
The conceptual underpinnings of dual unreality can be traced through a historical movement away from Cartesian dualism. For centuries, Western thought assumed that mind and body were separate substances. The endurance of this abstraction is remarkable given how little it corresponds to lived experience, yet it shaped medicine, theology, and philosophy well into the nineteenth century.
Freud provides the first decisive fracture in this picture. In “Mourning and Melancholia”, he writes that “the shadow of the object fell upon the ego”. Here the boundary between inner and outer collapses: the lost object does not remain external but becomes internalised, reorganising the structure of the self. The psyche is not sealed from the world but shaped by it. Freud does not use phenomenological vocabulary, yet his clinical insights undermine any strict separation of self and environment. Loss is not external; it becomes constitutive of subjectivity.
Husserl reframes this insight philosophically. Consciousness, he argues, is intentional: it is always consciousness of something. Mind is not a detached spectator but always directed toward the world. This reorients philosophy toward the analysis of lived experience rather than abstract mental processes. Husserl dissolves the Cartesian gap conceptually, just as Freud dissolves it clinically.
Merleau-Ponty brings Freud’s depth and Husserl’s intentionality together. In Phenomenology of Perception, he writes that “the body is our general medium for having a world”. The body is not an object among objects but the locus of orientation, familiarity, and meaning. Merleau-Ponty treats the unconscious not as a separate mental chamber but as part of the opacity and depth of the lived body. Through him, Freud’s relational psyche and Husserl’s intentional subject converge into a unified account of embodied worldhood. This is not a simple juxtaposition: Merleau-Ponty treats the unconscious as a dimension of embodied life, integrating Freud’s depth psychology into a phenomenological structure rather than holding the two apart.
This trajectory extends into the present through Vincent C. Müller’s work. In his 2025 chapter in the Cambridge Handbook, Müller writes that current AI systems “are not embodied agents engaged with the world” and instead “operate by manipulating representations according to formal rules or statistical patterns”. AI lacks the embodied grounding through which worldhood emerges. Müller therefore reasserts Merleau-Ponty’s insight, although his argument arises from an analytic, rather than phenomenological, tradition in a technological key: without embodiment, there is no perception and no world.
Together, Freud, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Müller form a conceptual lineage for understanding dual unreality. They show that experience depends upon the embodied, relational, and world-constituting structures that sustain it. When these structures fracture, worlds diverge.
Subnote: Freud’s “Shadow of the Object” — Loss, Identification, and Worldhood
Freud’s phrase “the shadow of the object fell upon the ego” is not simply metaphorical. It marks a deep shift in how mind and world are understood. Whereas Cartesian dualism places mind inside and world outside, Freud shows that loss traverses this boundary. The lost object does not disappear; it alters the ego. Identification replaces separation. Inner and outer intermingle.
This is important for thinking about dementia. Lolly’s perceptual collapse is not limited to external disorientation; it reorganises her sense of self. Rooms become strange, relationships lose their anchoring force, and the coherence of her world dissolves. William experiences a related but distinct form of collapse: his embodied orientation remains stable, yet the relational world that sustained his identity as husband falls away. Both situations echo Freud’s insight: loss reorganises subjectivity.
Freud also provides a methodological lesson. His theories emerge not through abstraction but through attention to breakdown, symptom, displacement, and the confusions of lived experience. As aphasia reveals linguistic structure through its disruption, dementia reveals perceptual and relational structure through its collapse. This subnote clarifies Freud’s role in the historical lineage and enriches the phenomenological account of dual unreality.
A separate Fairy Note develops the related psychoanalytic thread concerning narcissism, self-referential systems, and confabulation in both dementia and AI concerning narcissism, confabulation, and self-referential systems in both dementia and AI.)
2. Embodied Dissolution and the Phenomenology of Dual Unreality
With this framework in place, the structure of dual unreality becomes clear. Lolly’s perceptual world collapses because the embodied foundations of worldhood have dissolved. Her confabulations arise not through deception but as attempts to restore coherence. The house no longer appears as home; William no longer appears as husband. Her world is slipping.
William’s unreality is relational rather than perceptual. His embodied orientation remains intact. He knows who he is, where he is, and who Lolly was. Yet he must inhabit an environment in which none of these certainties are recognised. His world remains perceptually coherent but has lost its relational anchoring. Dual unreality describes the coexistence of these two experiential structures within the same physical space.
3. Confabulation, Pattern, and Adaptive Intelligence
Confabulation helps clarify the divergence. For Lolly, confabulation arises from embodied collapse. It is a compensatory act of world-repair.
AI confabulates differently. Its patterned outputs, often called hallucinations, arise from incomplete statistical correlations rather than experiential disruption. AI fills gaps without worldhood.
William’s position illustrates what Müller describes as embodied adaptive intelligence. He does not confabulate. Instead, he labels the unreality he encounters as dementia and adjusts accordingly.
Thus:
- Lolly confabulates because her world has collapsed.
- AI confabulates without a world to lose.
- William interprets rather than confabulates because his embodied orientation remains stable.
4. AI and the Swamp of Human Experience
Large AI models process vast datasets containing the expressive residues of human life. Patterns of grief, desire, care, fear, and memory become embedded in their architectures without being lived or understood by them. This is the “swamp of human experience”: a flattened archive of human expressive traces divorced from subjectivity.
An embodied subject can draw these patterns into meaningful relation. In Phantom Mirror, your engagement with this swamp mirrors psychoanalytic attention to dreams: images become condensations of affect, disorientation, and relational fracture. AI functions as a phantom mirror, reflecting patterns of human expression without inhabiting them.
Conclusion
This note articulates a way of understanding the divergent experiential structures produced by dementia and caregiving. Drawing upon Freud, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Müller, it distinguishes between two unreality structures: one arising from the dissolution of embodied perception, the other from the dissolution of relational meaning. AI provides a disembodied reflective surface through which these fractured worlds can be explored.
Phantom Mirror becomes a site where embodied subjectivity meets patterned archives, where grief meets representation, and where dual unreality can be thought and felt. The purpose is not to resolve these complexities but to articulate a language adequate to them.
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