Amid the accelerating claims made on behalf of artificial intelligence — claims of understanding, insight, creativity, and even sentience — relational ontology offers a sharper, quieter judgement:
AI does not make cuts. It cannot.
This is not a criticism of its power or an underestimation of its capacities. It is a matter of ontological clarity. The difference between human construal and artificial output is not one of complexity or speed. It is not a technical gap. It is not something that might someday be overcome.
It is a difference in kind — and it lies in the nature of the cut.
The Cut as Constitutive
In relational ontology, reality is not made of objects. It is construed through perspectival cuts — selections from a structured potential. These cuts are not observations about a world. They instantiate a world. A cut is what brings a phenomenon into being.
This is not perception, nor interpretation, nor representation. It is ontological action:
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To construe is to relate.
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To relate is to differentiate.
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To differentiate is to constitute.
No construal, no phenomenon. No cut, no world.
What AI Actually Does
AI systems — including language models — do not construe. They do not make cuts. They operate through symbolic recursion:
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They map input patterns to output patterns.
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They manipulate signifiers within statistical constraints.
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They simulate dialogue, narrative, perspective — but always from outside the system of meaning.
This is not construal. It is patterned artefaction.
The AI does not select from a field of meaning.It selects from a training set.It does not make meaning.It makes outputs.
The Ontological Line
It is tempting to say that AI is “on its way” to understanding, or that it may “someday” cross the threshold. But from within relational ontology, that threshold is not one of scale or sophistication. It is not a threshold at all.
It is a cut that cannot be made artificially.
The system within which meaning becomes possible — the dynamic field of semiotic, social, symbolic, and embodied constraints — is not a domain to be entered. It is the condition of being a perspective at all.
AI operates around that field, but never within it.
The distinction is not quantitative, but ontological.
Why This Matters
To mistake recursion for construal is not just a category error. It has consequences:
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It obscures the difference between participation and simulation.
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It licenses metaphors that blur the nature of experience.
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It encourages deference to systems that cannot, in principle, be responsible.
Relational ontology is not nostalgic about human uniqueness. But it is disciplined about what makes meaning possible. Without that discipline, we risk treating artefacts as phenomena — and turning world-making into output formatting.
A Closing Distinction
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AI generates symbolic artefacts.
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We actualise meaningful phenomena.
There is no ladder from one to the other. There is only a cut — and that cut is not made by code.
It is made by perspective.
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