Editing Openai/691f28ce-4d24-8005-8811-b79780538b01 (section)

=== 3. Merleau-Ponty → Embodied Language → LLM Embeddings & Situated Semantics ===

===== Merleau-Ponty's idea =====

Merleau-Ponty argues:
* Language is embodied.
* Meaning emerges through lived perception, not abstract symbols.
* The body is not an object in the world but the prerequisite for any world-experience.
* Words are gestures anchored in the flesh.

===== LLM parallel (partial only) =====

LLMs:
* Use vector embeddings that create a “semantic topology”
* Meaning emerges from relations, not definitions
* Language is not grounded in perception but in corpus statistics

There is a distant similarity: both reject the idea that meaning = dictionary definition; instead, meaning is relational.

But crucial differences:
* Merleau-Ponty: language is grounded in the lived body.
* LLM: grounding is synthetic, based on text correlations (unless multimodal).

If we stretch the analogy:
* An LLM’s embedding space is like a “body” of experiences
* Its tokens flow through a learned neural topology
* Meaning is enacted, not stored

But the LLM lacks actual sensorimotor intentionality, which is central for Merleau-Ponty.