Frances Egan

Large language models are the first systems to achieve high cognitive performance without clearly undergoing representation genesis: the transition from a non-representing physical system to one whose states guide behavior in a content-sensitive way. Every prior cognitive system we had studied had already made this transition before we could examine it, and philosophy of mind treated genesis as a background condition rather than an explanatory target. LLMs provide a case that does not clearly involve this transition, and this makes the genesis question urgent in a new way: if genesis did not occur, which cognitive capacities are affected, and why? We do not currently have the conceptual resources to answer this. The reason, this paper argues, is structural. The major frameworks in philosophy of mind, including the Language of Thought hypothesis, teleosemantics, predictive processing, enactivism, and genetic phenomenology, share a common feature when applied to the genesis question: each deploys, at some explanatory step, concepts whose purchase depends on the system already being organized as a representer. This pattern, which we call the Representation Presupposition structure, generates systematic explanatory deferral. Any attempt to explain the first acquisition of content-manipulable representation within the existing categorical vocabulary imports resources from the representational side of the very transition it is meant to explain. We call this the Representation Regress. The diagnostic result is that the current philosophy of mind lacks the conceptual resources to explain representation genesis without presupposing what is to be explained. The paper is a conceptual diagnosis: it does not offer a new theory, but establishes the precise shape of the problem and derives two minimum adequacy conditions on any theory that avoids this structure. The appearance of LLMs is what makes the absence of a theory capable of explaining representation genesis consequential rather than merely theoretical.