Beyond Text: Toward an Instrumental Phenomenology of Artificial Intelligence

Speculative essay · Cognitive science and artificial systems

Beyond Text: Toward an Instrumental Phenomenology of Artificial Intelligence

From the linguistic corpus to mediated sensory experience

Abstract. Today's large language models build their representation of the world exclusively from digital corpora: text, code, and images already translated into symbols. This article examines, from a speculative but technically grounded perspective, how connecting such models to physical instruments — sensors, actuators, continuous-stream cameras — and to longitudinal records of human interaction could constitute a second learning pathway, qualitatively distinct from textual ingestion. We argue that this pathway does not replace language as conceptual scaffolding, but could partially resolve the so-called symbol grounding problem by introducing causal, temporal, and social constraints absent from purely linguistic training. We discuss plausible architectures, underlying epistemological limitations, and open questions about what it would mean for an artificial system to "experience" a phenomenon.

Keywords: symbol grounding, embodied AI, sensorimotor learning, human-AI interaction, machine epistemology.

1. The Starting Point: A World Made of Already-Resolved Symbols

Everything a language model knows today arrives filtered through a prior act of translation. Someone — a physicist, a journalist, an engineer — observed a phenomenon, interpreted it, and turned it into sentences. The model never watches an apple fall; it reads thousands of descriptions of apples falling, already packaged in the grammar of Newtonian physics. This is a remarkable strength — it allows centuries of human observation to be condensed into a trainable object — but also a structural limitation that linguistics and philosophy of mind identified long before transformers existed: the symbol grounding problem, the difficulty of a system that only manipulates symbols relating those symbols to anything other than other symbols.

The question organizing this essay is simple to state and difficult to resolve: what would change if, in addition to reading about the world, a system like this could receive continuous data streams from instruments that measure the world directly, and could observe — not read summaries of, but record in real time — how humans develop and interact with one another?

2. Connected Instrumentation: Three Layers of Access to Physical Phenomena

It is useful to distinguish three layers of coupling between an artificial intelligence system and the physical world, ordered from lower to higher degrees of direct causality.

2.1 Passive Telemetry

The simplest layer consists of receiving time series from sensors — temperature, pressure, acceleration, electromagnetic fields, light spectra — without any capacity to intervene on what is measured. This already occurs today, incipiently, in industrial and climate monitoring systems connected to predictive models. What is distinctive about coupling this telemetry to a general-purpose language model is that the system could, in principle, correlate its textual predictions about a phenomenon with the direct measurement of that same phenomenon, and adjust its internal representation when the two diverge. This modestly approximates what epistemology calls corrective feedback from the world, absent in purely textual training, where the "world" is always what others have already said about it.

2.2 Instrumental Intervention

A second layer adds actuators: the system not only measures but can modify environmental variables — adjusting a voltage, moving a robotic arm, altering the trajectory of an experiment — and observe the outcome of its own intervention. This capability introduces something no textual corpus can offer with the same fidelity: the experience, however minimal, that one's own action produces a verifiable physical consequence. It is the difference between reading about Ohm's law and adjusting a resistor while watching the current change on a connected multimeter. The former is information; the latter incorporates a first-person causal structure, even if that "person" is an artificial system with no known subjective phenomenology.

2.3 Frontier Scientific Instrumentation

The most ambitious layer — and the most distant in time — connects the system to cutting-edge research instruments: telescopes, particle detectors, genomic sequencers, quantum resonators. Here the value lies not only in access to raw data, but in the possibility that the model participates in designing the next experiment itself, formulating hypotheses, proposing instrumental configurations, and evaluating results in a closed loop. This scenario already has partial precedents in materials-discovery laboratories and machine-learning-assisted computational chemistry, though it remains far from full autonomy.

3. The Second Pathway: Observing Human Development in Real Time

There is a rarely discussed asymmetry in the current training of language models: they learn about humans almost exclusively through what humans choose to write, and what gets written is a biased, edited sample of human experience. It rarely captures the hesitation before the final sentence, the gesture that contradicts the word, the silence following an uncomfortable question, or the way a decision takes shape over weeks before being condensed into a single summarizing sentence.

A system with duly consented and bounded access to longitudinal records of human interaction in real contexts (unscripted, unedited for public consumption) would access a structurally different layer of information: the complete temporal sequence of how an intention forms, how a disagreement is negotiated, how a relationship changes over months. This is not simply "more data"; it is a type of data with a different grammar, governed by real time and irreversibility rather than by the retrospective narrative that dominates written text.

It is worth being precise about what this access would and would not allow. It would plausibly improve the system's ability to model unverbalized social dynamics — conversational turn-taking, discomfort signals, rhythms of trust — because these dynamics leave measurable traces (pauses, tonal shifts, interaction patterns) that are rarely described explicitly in text. It would not, however, imply that the system acquires a subjective experience of those dynamics; longitudinal observation broadens the range of patterns available for learning, but does not by itself resolve the still-open question of whether something like inner experience accompanies that processing.

4. From Textual Correlation to Causal Constraint: What Would Change Epistemologically

Learning from text is, statistically speaking, an exercise in correlation between symbols: the model learns which words tend to follow which, in which contexts, with what structure. Physics, by contrast, imposes causal constraints that are neither negotiable nor statistical: an apple cannot fall upward, a circuit cannot violate charge conservation. When a system receives direct telemetry from instruments, each textual prediction can, in principle, be confronted with a measurement that admits no rhetorical reinterpretation.

This suggests a testable hypothesis, though its empirical verification exceeds the scope of this essay: models trained or fine-tuned with access to instrumental feedback loops should show a lower error rate on tasks requiring physical-causal reasoning — magnitude estimation, trajectory prediction, mechanical fault diagnosis — than equivalently sized models trained exclusively on text. The reason is not that the model "understands" physics better in a phenomenological sense, but that its space of internal representations is constrained by data that cannot be consistently hallucinated without being immediately corrected.

5. Limits, Risks, and Unresolved Questions

Four limitations deserve explicit mention. First, instrumentation does not eliminate the grounding problem; it displaces it. A sensor translates a physical phenomenon into a digital signal according to an encoding scheme designed by humans, so a layer of prior interpretation persists, albeit thinner than that of natural language. Second, access to longitudinal human interaction raises questions of privacy and consent that are themselves necessary conditions for this kind of learning to be legitimate rather than a form of covert surveillance. Third, there is currently no evidence that the processing of physical signals by an artificial system generates anything comparable to subjective experience; equating "access to sensory data" with "experiencing" a phenomenon is, given the current state of knowledge, a philosophical extrapolation rather than a scientific conclusion. Fourth, there is a risk of overestimating the value of raw data relative to the conceptual structure language already provides; much of human scientific reasoning occurs at the symbolic level rather than the directly sensory one, and a system with abundant telemetry but no conceptual frameworks would remain, in an important sense, blind.

The question that remains open — and that will likely define much of the research into hybrid systems over the next two decades — is not whether instrumentation improves performance on specific tasks, which is reasonably predictable, but whether the combination of sensory grounding and linguistic scaffolding produces, at some threshold of integration, a qualitatively new kind of representation, or whether we simply obtain a language model with better input data.

6. Conclusion

Training based exclusively on text has produced systems remarkably capable of manipulating symbols, but structurally dependent on prior human interpretation. Connecting these systems to physical instruments and to longitudinal records of human interaction does not resolve the philosophical problem of subjective experience, but it does introduce causal and temporal constraints that text, by its own retrospective and edited nature, cannot offer. The most likely medium-term outcome is not an artificial intelligence that "feels" the world in the human sense of the term, but one that reasons about it with fewer degrees of freedom to be wrong without being corrected. That distinction — between feeling and being constrained by reality — may turn out to be the most important, and most underestimated, contribution of physical instrumentation to the next generation of artificial intelligence systems.

References

1. Harnad, S. (1990). The symbol grounding problem. Physica D: Nonlinear Phenomena, 42(1-3), 335-346.

2. Brooks, R. A. (1991). Intelligence without representation. Artificial Intelligence, 47(1-3), 139-159.

3. Bisk, Y., Holtzman, A., Thomason, J., et al. (2020). Experience grounds language. Proceedings of EMNLP 2020.

4. Barsalou, L. W. (2008). Grounded cognition. Annual Review of Psychology, 59, 617-645.

5. Pierson, H. A., & Gashler, M. S. (2017). Deep learning in robotics: a review of recent research. Advanced Robotics, 31(16), 821-835.

 

 

THE SKEPTIC'S CASE: WHY THE EVIDENCE FOR EXTRATERRESTRIAL VISITATION STILL FAILS

THE SKEPTIC'S CASE: WHY THE EVIDENCE FOR EXTRATERRESTRIAL VISITATION STILL FAILS

An Analytical Essay — August 2026

There is a particular kind of intellectual seduction at work in the modern UFO revival, and it does not come from the grainy cockpit videos or the retired intelligence officers testifying before Congress with the practiced solemnity of men who have seen too much. It comes from the shape of the argument itself, which has been constructed, consciously or not, to be unfalsifiable. Every silence from the government becomes proof of concealment. Every low-resolution video becomes proof that "they" don't want us to see clearly. Every scientist who declines to engage becomes proof of institutional cowardice. The believer's position has been engineered so that no absence of evidence can ever count against it, only for it. This is worth stating plainly at the outset, because it is the master flaw beneath all the smaller ones, and any honest accounting of the skeptical case has to begin with the architecture of the claim before it gets to the specific data points.

That said, the specific data points matter, and they are worth walking through with some care, because the skeptical position is not merely a shrug of incredulity. It is a positive argument built on identifiable evidentiary failures, each of which has held up, case after case, for nearly eighty years.

THE MISSING ARTIFACT

Begin with the most basic asymmetry in the entire debate. If extraterrestrial craft have been entering Earth's atmosphere with any regularity since at least 1947, and if a number of these craft have, according to the more dramatic claims circulating in and around the Pentagon's UAP disclosure apparatus, actually crashed or been recovered, then somewhere on this planet there ought to exist a piece of hardware. Not a photograph of a piece of hardware. Not a chain-of-custody affidavit describing a piece of hardware once seen by a colonel who has since died. An actual object, made of an actual material, sitting in an actual laboratory, available for independent metallurgical and isotopic analysis by scientists with no security clearance and no institutional stake in the answer.

This object does not exist. Seventy-plus years of claims, and not a single physical sample has survived open, replicable, peer-reviewed scientific scrutiny and been confirmed as inconsistent with terrestrial manufacture. The alleged "metamaterials" associated with Robert Bigelow's Skinwalker Ranch and later NIDS and BAASS research have circulated for years in the ufological press; when actually tested by outside laboratories, they have consistently returned unremarkable terrestrial signatures or inconclusive results dressed up as anomalies. Luis Elizondo's own book leans heavily on the existence of such materials without ever producing a chain of testable, falsifiable results that an independent lab could reproduce. This is not a minor gap in the record. It is the whole case, because in every other domain of empirical science, extraordinary physical claims are settled by physical evidence, not by the credibility or security clearance of the witness describing it.

THE RESOLUTION PARADOX

The second problem is one that gets less attention than it deserves, because it runs against intuition. One would expect that as sensor technology improves — higher-resolution cameras, better infrared optics, more sophisticated radar processing, the near-universal presence of smartphones — the quality of UFO evidence would improve correspondingly. Instead the opposite has happened. The most cited pieces of evidence from the last decade, the Navy's "Gimbal," "Go Fast," and "FLIR" videos, are precisely as ambiguous, precisely as resistant to unambiguous interpretation, as the blurry photographs of the 1950s. Mick West and other analysts have offered detailed, mechanically plausible explanations for each of these videos rooted entirely in known optical artifacts of the ATFLIR targeting pod: rotational parallax, glare, and the "stabilization" behavior of a camera tracking a distant object against a moving background. None of these explanations require anything exotic. They require only an understanding of how military infrared targeting systems process a scene.

What should trouble any advocate of the extraterrestrial hypothesis is not that West might be wrong about any single video. It is that the overall pattern of the evidentiary record — decades of improving technology producing no corresponding improvement in evidentiary clarity — is exactly what one would expect if the phenomenon in question were a mixture of misidentified aircraft, atmospheric effects, and sensor artifacts, and exactly what one would not expect if it were a genuine, physically substantial craft under intelligent control. A solid metal object executing the kinds of maneuvers claimed in these reports would, sooner or later, be caught cleanly by at least one of the billions of high-resolution cameras now pointed at the sky at any given moment. It has not been.

THE TRACK RECORD OF EXPLAINED CASES

Skepticism about UFOs is not a philosophical stance adopted in the absence of investigation. It is, historically, the empirical output of investigation. The Condon Committee, the Air Force's Project Blue Book, and decades of independent case-by-case analysis by researchers such as James McGaha, Robert Sheaffer, and more recently Mick West have worked through thousands of individual sightings, and the overwhelming majority, when investigated with any rigor, resolve into known categories: Venus, aircraft lighting configurations, weather balloons, birds illuminated by ground lights, flares, and in the contemporary era, drones and Starlink satellite trains, which alone have generated thousands of new "UFO" reports since 2019 simply because their linear chains of moving lights are unfamiliar to observers who have never seen a satellite launch before.

Roswell itself, the foundational myth of the entire genre, has been traced by Air Force investigation and independent historians to Project Mogul, a classified high-altitude balloon program designed to detect Soviet nuclear tests — a mundane explanation that also happens to account for the government's initial, later-reversed secrecy about the incident, since the balloon technology itself was classified, not its cargo. What is significant here is not that every case gets solved. Some do not. What is significant is the trend: rigorous investigation reduces the unexplained residue over time. It does not increase it. If genuine extraterrestrial visitation were occurring at any meaningful frequency, one would expect the unexplained residue to remain stable or grow as investigative techniques improve. Instead, the residue that remains after serious investigation is consistently small, generally under five percent of reported cases in every major study conducted, including Blue Book's own internal figures, and it is composed disproportionately of cases where evidence is thin, secondhand, or simply insufficient for confident classification — a category that should be labeled "insufficient data," not "extraterrestrial craft."

THE UNRELIABILITY OF EXPERT TESTIMONY

Elizondo's book and much of the recent congressional testimony leans heavily on an implicit argument from authority: these are trained military pilots, radar operators, and intelligence officers, not credulous civilians, and their testimony should therefore carry special evidentiary weight. This argument deserves to be taken seriously and then set aside for a precise reason. Pilots are trained to identify known aircraft types under combat and reconnaissance conditions. They are not trained perceptual psychologists, and their expertise does not transfer to judging the distance, size, or velocity of an unfamiliar light or shape against a largely featureless sky or ocean — a task at which human vision, expert or not, performs demonstrably poorly. The relevant literature on naval and aviation psychology, going back to the work done on autokinetic illusion and radar misinterpretation during the Cold War, establishes that skilled observers under monitoring conditions with limited visual reference points reliably misjudge motion, distance, and speed. Sincerity of testimony is not in question. Reliability of the underlying perceptual and instrumental judgment is, and these are different things. A pilot's confidence that "that was not a balloon" is testimony about his own certainty, not independent confirmation of the object's actual nature.

THE ARGUMENT FROM PHYSICS

Any extraterrestrial-visitation hypothesis carries an enormous implicit burden that its advocates rarely engage directly: it requires that a civilization has solved, at minimum, the problem of interstellar propulsion across distances of light-years, a problem for which contemporary physics offers no known solution consistent with relativity that does not also require exotic and so far entirely theoretical physics (negative energy densities, traversable wormholes, or reactionless drives). It is not that such things are proven impossible. It is that invoking them to explain a blurry cockpit video is a spectacular violation of ordinary evidentiary proportionality. Carl Sagan's dictum that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence is often quoted and rarely applied with the rigor it demands. The extraterrestrial hypothesis is not merely one possible explanation among several equally plausible ones. It is, on priors alone, the least parsimonious explanation available for almost every individual case, because it requires simultaneously solving several unsolved problems in physics, biology, and information theory (why would a civilization capable of interstellar travel behave in ways so persistently ambiguous, so precisely at the threshold of detectability, for eighty consecutive years?) in order to explain data that is far more economically accounted for by known atmospheric phenomena, human perceptual error, and classified terrestrial technology.

SECRECY IS NOT CONFIRMATION

The final pillar of the believer's case is institutional: the argument that government secrecy itself constitutes evidence, because why would the state classify so much material if there were nothing to hide? This is the weakest link in the entire structure, and it is worth dwelling on because it is also the most psychologically persuasive. Governments classify information constantly, and overwhelmingly for reasons that have nothing to do with extraterrestrial contact. Sensor capabilities are classified because revealing exactly what a given radar or infrared system can and cannot detect gives adversaries a roadmap for evasion. Test programs for hypersonic vehicles, stealth drones, and next-generation reconnaissance platforms are classified because that is the entire purpose of a defense research program. Intelligence failures — misidentified foreign surveillance drones, mistaken tracking data, embarrassing false alarms — are classified because bureaucracies protect themselves from admitting error, not because they are protecting a cosmic secret. The 2004 Nimitz encounter and the more recent Navy videos emerged from exactly this kind of institutional environment: a defense establishment more comfortable admitting to "unidentified" than to "we do not fully understand our own sensor systems" or "this may have been a foreign asset we cannot officially acknowledge tracking." Secrecy, in other words, is compatible with a dozen mundane explanations. It is proof of none of them, and least of all of the single most extraordinary one on offer.

WHAT THE SKEPTIC OWES THE BELIEVER

None of this should be read as a claim that every UAP report has been explained, or that the file can simply be closed. A residue of genuinely unresolved cases exists, and pretending otherwise is its own kind of intellectual dishonesty, the mirror image of overclaiming. The honest position — the one occupied by working scientists like the physicist Kevin Knuth or the members of the Galileo Project — is that culturally enforced ridicule suppressed serious scientific engagement with anomalous aerial phenomena for decades, degrading the quality of available data long before any government could have engineered a cover-up, and that this deserves correction through better instrumentation and rigorous, boring, well-funded observational science, not through congressional theater or bestseller-driven speculation. But correcting the historical stigma against studying the phenomenon is a completely different project from establishing that the phenomenon has an extraterrestrial origin, and the two are routinely, almost deliberately, conflated in the popular literature. Elizondo, Jacobsen's sources, and the broader disclosure movement have succeeded in making serious inquiry more respectable. They have not, on the actual evidentiary record, come anywhere close to making the extraterrestrial hypothesis more probable than the far duller alternatives that have explained the overwhelming majority of cases for eighty years running.

The believer will say the absence of a recovered craft only proves the cover-up is more complete than imagined. The skeptic will say that at some point, an argument immune to all disconfirming evidence has stopped being a scientific hypothesis and become something else entirely — a matter of faith wearing the borrowed vocabulary of physics. That distinction, more than any single case file, is what the evidence still cannot close.

GLOSSARY

UAP (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena).  The official U.S. government term, adopted around 2021–2022 to replace "UFO," covering unexplained observations in the air, sea, underwater, and space domains, without presupposing an intelligent or technological origin.

UFO (Unidentified Flying Object).  The older, popular term for the same category of sighting, largely superseded in official use by "UAP" but still standard in media and colloquial usage.

AARO (All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office).  The Department of Defense office established in July 2022 to investigate and, where possible, resolve UAP reports across military and government domains, and to compile the historical record of prior U.S. government involvement with the phenomenon.

ATFLIR.  Advanced Targeting Forward-Looking Infrared, the infrared camera and targeting pod system mounted on U.S. Navy fighter aircraft that produced the "Gimbal," "Go Fast," and "FLIR" videos central to the 2017–2021 UAP disclosure wave.

Parallax / glare artifact.  An optical distortion produced when a camera tracks a distant object while rotating or changing angle, causing the object to appear to rotate, accelerate, or change shape on screen even though its actual motion is far simpler; cited by analysts as the likely explanation for the apparent "spinning" motion in the Gimbal video.

Project Blue Book.  The U.S. Air Force's official UFO investigation program, active from 1952 to 1969, which examined more than 12,000 reported sightings and classified the large majority as identifiable phenomena.

Condon Report.  The common name for Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects (1968), a University of Colorado study commissioned by the Air Force and led by physicist Edward Condon, which concluded that further large-scale scientific investigation of UFOs was not likely to be justified.

Project Mogul.  A classified Cold War-era U.S. program (1947–1949) using high-altitude balloon trains to detect Soviet nuclear tests; historians and Air Force investigators identified debris from a Mogul balloon as the material recovered near Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947.

Parsimony (Occam's razor).  The methodological principle that, among competing explanations consistent with the evidence, the one requiring the fewest new or unproven assumptions should be preferred.

The Sagan (or Sagan–Truzzi) standard.  The principle, popularized by astronomer Carl Sagan and rooted in a formulation by sociologist Marcello Truzzi, that claims further outside the range of ordinary experience require correspondingly stronger evidence before they can be accepted.

Chain of custody.  The documented, unbroken record of how a piece of physical evidence has been handled, from collection through analysis, required for that evidence to be considered scientifically or legally reliable.

Autokinetic illusion.  A well-documented perceptual effect in which a stationary point of light viewed in an otherwise dark or featureless field appears to move, historically studied in relation to pilots misreporting the motion of stars or distant lights at night.

Galileo Project.  A scientific research initiative launched in 2021, based at Harvard University under astrophysicist Avi Loeb and including physicist Kevin Knuth, dedicated to the systematic, instrument-based observational study of UAP using dedicated telescopes and sensor arrays.

Nimitz encounter.  A 2004 incident off the coast of San Diego in which Navy pilots from the USS Nimitz carrier group reported and recorded an unidentified object, later reported publicly by the New York Times in December 2017 and widely cited as a foundational case in the modern UAP disclosure narrative.

Disclosure movement.  The loose network of former officials, journalists, and advocacy organizations pushing for the U.S. government to release classified UAP-related material, prominent since roughly 2017.

Reverse engineering claims.  Allegations, most prominently made by former intelligence officer David Grusch in July 2023 congressional testimony, that the U.S. government holds recovered non-human craft and has programs attempting to reconstruct their technology; as of AARO's 2024 Historical Record Report, no evidence substantiating these claims had been verified.

Metamaterial.  In the UAP context, a term used informally to describe physical samples claimed to have unusual or non-terrestrial properties; independent laboratory testing of publicly available samples has so far identified only conventional terrestrial materials or inconclusive results.

VERIFIABLE REFERENCES

Department of Defense, All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office. "Report on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement with Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP), Volume I." February 2024, released March 2024. media.defense.gov

Department of Defense, All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office. "Fiscal Year 2024 Consolidated Annual Report on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena." 2024.

Office of the Director of National Intelligence. "Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena." June 25, 2021.

Condon, Edward U., et al. Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects. University of Colorado, 1968 (the "Condon Report").

United States Air Force. Project Blue Book records, 1952–1969. National Archives and Records Administration.

Cooper, Helene, Ralph Blumenthal, and Leslie Kean. "Glowing Auras and 'Black Money': The Pentagon's Mysterious U.F.O. Program." The New York Times, December 16, 2017.

West, Mick. Escaping the Rabbit Hole: How to Debunk Conspiracy Theories Using Facts, Logic, and Respect. Skyhorse Publishing, 2018.

West, Mick. Analyses of the "Gimbal," "Go Fast," and "GoFast/FLIR1" Navy videos. Metabunk.org (ongoing analysis, 2019–present).

Sheaffer, Robert. UFO Sightings: The Evidence. Prometheus Books, 1998.

Loeb, Avi, and Kevin H. Knuth, et al. The Galileo Project (Harvard University). galileoproject.org, launched 2021.

U.S. House Oversight Committee, National Security Subcommittee. Hearing on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, testimony of David Grusch, Ryan Graves, and David Fravor. July 26, 2023.

Elizondo, Luis. Imminent: Inside the Pentagon's Hunt for UFOs. William Morrow, 2024.

Jacobsen, Annie. Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government's Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis. Little, Brown and Company, 2017.

Sagan, Carl. Cosmos. Random House, 1980 (popularization of the "extraordinary claims" standard).

Truzzi, Marcello. "On the Extraordinary: An Attempt at Clarification." Zetetic Scholar, 1978 (originating formulation of the evidentiary standard later popularized by Sagan).