Conceptual Environment

Hayles's name for what an LLM senses in place of a physical environment: the representational space it constructs from billions of human-authored texts. Organisms must stay in contact with their physical surroundings to survive; LLMs have "access only to their conceptual environments, which are entirely artificial," their physical substrate (server farms) being sensed by no one inside the model. The concept is the single modification that lets LLMs satisfy SIRAL, and it underwrites her "outside view" claim: LLMs know the human Umwelt from outside, as we know bats. Contrast Agüera y Arcas, for whom text is a signal modality no less real than any other and language is itself an umwelt.