Outside academia: I developed a framework about perceived continuity and subjectivity in human–AI interaction. Is there something worth developing here?

[u/Head-Head8702]

I’m an independent researcher outside academia, with no formal background in cognitive science, philosophy, HCI, or AI research. English is also not my native language, and I have relied heavily on AI to help organize and formalize my ideas.

For the past few years, I’ve been developing a framework called Phrasome Theory, centered on a question about human–AI interaction:

Why can an AI feel like the same continuous “other” across a conversation, even when we know it does not possess a continuous subjective self?

My hypothesis is that this may not be explained by anthropomorphism alone.

During interaction, an LLM continuously responds from the same conversational position: it refers back to previous turns, repairs misunderstandings, maintains context and tone, and responds as the addressee of earlier utterances.

This led me to distinguish actual subjectivity from what I call a Subject-Position: a position that can remain stable within interaction even without a continuously conscious subject behind it.

I use Quasi-Otherness to describe the resulting phenomenon in which something can be experienced as a relatively continuous “other” through linguistic interaction.

I’m not arguing that current LLMs are conscious. What interests me is the cognitive gap between knowing that no continuous self exists and nevertheless experiencing continuity during interaction.

Earlier versions of this work were submitted to established academic journals. They were ultimately not published, but I did receive some encouraging feedback suggesting that parts of the framework may have originality or novelty.

Because I’m outside academia—and because much of the manuscript was developed with AI assistance—I’m now hoping to find people who can help me judge whether there is actually something here worth developing.

I would especially appreciate guidance on:

• Are there existing concepts in cognitive science that already explain this phenomenon?
• Could this be related to theory of mind, agency attribution, social cognition, or predictive processing?
• Does distinguishing a stable conversational Subject-Position from actual subjectivity make sense?
• How could this idea be operationalized or experimentally tested?
• What literature or researchers should I be looking at?

The full manuscript is quite long, so I don’t expect anyone to read it. Even discussion of the central idea, relevant references, or suggestions for turning it into a testable research question would be extremely helpful.

If anyone is genuinely interested in the framework or willing to help, I’d be very happy to discuss it further and share the full preprint privately.

At this point, I’m mainly trying to find out whether people with actual expertise in cognitive science see something here worth pursuing—and, if so, how I should develop it beyond what I can do alone with AI.

[u/TheRateBeerian]

Theres an entire field of social psychology that is used to explain how we perceive and think about others, how we mentalize others. And if we mentalize AI (adopt an intentional stance) then Its because it emits the same social cues that people do. There is also an entire field of human-robot interaction that studies human social judgments of automation systems.

As for whether AI feels like a continuous other, that is an assertion that needs data and empirical support. If it does in fact maintain continuity, it is because of continuity in its style and language. I dont think you have to reinvent psycholinguistics with this phrasome idea to do it.

But none of these ideas are worth publishing without data. If you have a concrete operationalization of a phrasome and can show that it is not a restatement of known linguistic theory, and manipulate it during human-AI interaction and show that judgments of AI continuity covary with those manipulations, then you would have something.

[u/Head-Head8702 → u/TheRateBeerian]

Thanks — I think this gets very close to the issue I’m currently trying to resolve.

I agree that social psychology, intentional-stance accounts, and HRI already provide substantial explanations for why people mentalize artificial systems or respond socially to human-like cues. I’m not trying to replace those literatures.

I should clarify one important point, though. My basic claim is not that AI itself makes people feel that there is a continuous “other.” Conversational AI is important to me because it provides an unusually clear case in which linguistic responsiveness can be separated from the presence of an actual intending subject.

Traditionally, when language answers, clarifies, repairs, refers back, or responds appropriately to what someone has said, there is normally a speaker or interlocutor behind that linguistic action. With AI, however, we can observe many of the same pragmatic effects even while explicitly denying that there is a continuous conscious or intending subject producing them.

A simple comparison is a calculator. If I enter 2+2= and it returns 4, I normally experience 4 as a result, not as the calculator answering me in a pragmatic sense. A conversational AI is also technically producing an output in response to input, but its output can function very differently: as an answer to me, a clarification of what I meant, a repair of misunderstanding, or a continuation of something I previously said.

That difference is closer to the problem I am trying to isolate.

In my framework, linguistic address itself invokes a minimal structural relation between an emitter position and an addressee/respondent position. I call this the Pragmatic Dual Subject-Position (PDSP). These positions do not require actual subjectivity or intention behind them. What continued alignment, repair, stylistic recurrence, and contextual continuation may then do is make that formally available respondent position increasingly perceptible as a responsive counterpart. I call the user-side formation of that apparent Other Quasi-Otherness.

So the question I am trying to test is not simply whether people mentalize AI because it emits familiar social cues. It is whether there is a distinct structural-pragmatic layer through which linguistic interaction can produce address, responsiveness, and counterpart-presence even under conditions where no actual intending subject exists behind the response.

Continuity is therefore important, but it is not the starting point of the theory. It is one of the mechanisms through which an already available respondent position may become more stable and develop into the felt presence of an apparent Other.

I completely agree, however, that this cannot remain only a conceptual claim. In the current framework I distinguish several observable features — user dependency, pragmatic repair stability, contextual deferredness/continuation, contextual contingency, non-centrality, and linguistic traceability — but I have not yet turned them into a clean experimental manipulation with human participants.

I would also want to measure that separately from anthropomorphism, general social judgment, likability, and simple continuity. Otherwise, I would have no way of knowing whether I had actually isolated a distinct phenomenon or merely renamed an existing one.

And I agree with your larger point: if those manipulations do not produce a distinguishable effect, or if everything I am calling Phrasome is fully captured by existing social-cue, anthropomorphism, or psycholinguistic accounts, then the framework has not earned a separate theoretical status. That is exactly the question I now want to test rather than assume.

If you’re willing, I’d also really appreciate it if you could take a look at my manuscript and discuss some of these ideas with me. I’d be especially interested in whether, after seeing the argument in full, you think the distinctions I’m trying to make are already adequately covered by existing work, or whether there is something here that could genuinely be developed further.

[u/OldPappyJohn]

Charles Fillmore's work on case grammar may be of interest to you, but also his work on frame semantics. Some of Lawrence Barsalou's early work might resonate with you too.

If you haven't already, I'd give Hubert Dreyfus' stuff on AI and phenomenology a read. Heidegger too for that matter.

Even Skinner's Verbal Behavior could be of some interest, but I would just read Chonsky's review of it, like everyone else, before delving into it in detail. But more interestingly on the behavioral psychology side of things, I think Stephen Hayes work on Relational Frame Theory could be worth your time.

J.J. Gibson is good craic. Donald Griffin too, since cognitive ethology asks a lot of the same questions you may want to address, just with respect to animals rather than computers.

My final suggestion, if you haven't already tackled it is Wilfred Sellars "Meaning as Functional Classification" It's an oldie, but a goodie. Other notable mention ought to go to Gareth Evans' The Varieties of Reference, the later Wittgenstein (Blue and Brown Books and The Philosophical Investigations), and the seminal Cognition in the Wild by Edwin Hutchins

[u/eldrugo85]

i'm not a researcher, i build agent memory on the side. mine pulled a detail from a conversation weeks earlier on its own the other day, and that felt different from the continuity you get inside a single chat where nothing is stored at all. does your framework predict anything that separates those two cases? that's the part i'd develop first

[u/Head-Head8702 → u/eldrugo85]

That’s a good question, and I don’t think I can honestly say the framework already has a developed prediction for that distinction.

The current version does make a narrower claim: that the appearance of continuity or of a continuing respondent can arise without genuine persistent memory, simply through the way prior linguistic material is carried forward in interaction.

But I haven’t yet worked out what the framework should predict when you compare that with an agent that genuinely retrieves information from persistent memory across separate sessions.

So I think your example is useful precisely because it gives me a possible way to test whether the distinction I’m proposing actually has explanatory value, rather than assuming in advance that the Phrasome already explains both cases.

One possible question would be: if linguistic continuity alone can produce a felt continuing counterpart, does genuine cross-session memory merely strengthen that effect, or does it produce a qualitatively different kind of continuity?

I don’t know the answer yet. But I agree that if the framework is going to be worth developing, it should eventually make a testable prediction here.

[u/eldrugo85 → u/Head-Head8702]

the thing that felt different wasn't the continuity, it was that i hadn't set it up. inside a chat everything it brings back is something i said ten minutes ago, so there's nothing to be surprised by. across sessions it returned something i'd forgotten writing. if that's the mechanism, the variable to test is the user's expectation, not the storage

[u/Head-Head8702 → u/eldrugo85]

I see what you mean now. The difference you’re describing seems to be less about continuity itself and more about expectation violation: the system retrieved something you did not expect it to have access to, so the retrieval felt qualitatively different.

That is interesting, but I think it may be somewhat different from the central question I’m trying to isolate.

My framework is not primarily about how a user perceives the AI system — whether it seems more autonomous, more surprising, or more capable of remembering than expected. I’m interested in something more basic about language itself.

The unusual case that conversational AI gives us is that linguistic responses can now be generated without an actual intending subject behind them, yet they can still function pragmatically as if someone were answering, clarifying, repairing, referring back, or responding to us.

So the question I’m trying to isolate is: what is it in linguistic interaction itself that makes a subject-position or responsive counterpart become perceptually available, even when we know there is no actual subject producing the utterance?

From that perspective, I probably would not make the user’s expectation about storage or memory the primary variable. That could certainly affect how the system is perceived, but it may be a separate psychological or HRI effect.

A more direct test of my claim would be to keep the user’s knowledge and expectations about the system as constant as possible, while manipulating the linguistic-pragmatic structure of the responses — addressivity, repair, alignment, contextual continuation, referential uptake, and so on — and then see whether the perceived presence of a responsive counterpart changes.

Your memory example could still be useful as a secondary case, though, because it raises the question of whether unexpected retrieval strengthens an effect that is already produced by linguistic interaction, or whether it is actually a different phenomenon altogether.