The Illusion of Understanding
Why Read This
What Makes This Article Worth Your Time
Summary
What This Article Is About
In this wide-ranging Substack essay, Stephanie Shen argues that the apparent fluency of large language models (LLMs) creates a dangerous “illusion of understanding” — one that can only be dismantled by a clear grasp of what language actually is. She draws on two pillars: Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language, particularly his theories of language games, family resemblances, and the embodied nature of meaning; and modern neuroscience, tracing the distributed brain systems — Broca’s area, Wernicke’s area, the arcuate fasciculus, and many others — that show language comprehension is inseparable from memory, emotion, and embodied experience.
Shen’s central claim is that LLMs produce statistically plausible text without any of the preverbal, experiential, and embodied processes that underpin genuine human understanding. Humans project their own inner lives onto LLMs — the same empathic mechanism Adam Smith described — and mistake pattern-matching for thinking. She concludes on a pragmatic note: rather than fearing or anthropomorphising LLMs, we should treat them as powerful but limited tools — closer to calculators and planes than to minds — and always infuse their outputs with our own irreplaceable intelligence, creativity, and lived experience.
Key Points
Main Takeaways
Human Language Is Mostly Preverbal
As Michael Pollan discovered, much of human thought arrives as images, sensations, and concepts — with words trailing behind as an afterthought. Meaning precedes language; for LLMs, language is all there is.
Wittgenstein: Meaning Comes from Use, Not Definition
Language has no fixed hidden essence. Words get their meaning from how humans use them in specific contexts — through shared forms of life involving gestures, emotions, and embodied actions that go far beyond text.
The Brain’s Language Network Is Distributed and Embodied
Modern neuroscience shows that language comprehension is spread across the temporal, parietal, and frontal lobes and is deeply intertwined with memory retrieval, spatial processing, and social interaction — not localised in a single spot.
We Create the Illusion Ourselves
Humans naturally project their own inner lives onto anything that uses language — the same empathic mechanism that enables us to feel for fictional characters also makes us attribute understanding to LLMs where none exists.
LLMs Hallucinate as a Default Mode
Because LLMs generate output through statistical pattern-matching without forming beliefs or holding any commitment to truth, fabricating plausible-sounding but factually incorrect statements is not a bug — it is a structural feature of how they operate.
Use LLMs as Tools, Not Oracles
The right response is neither fear nor uncritical trust. LLMs should be treated like calculators or planes — powerful instruments that do specific things far better than humans, but that require human judgment, fact-checking, and original thinking to be genuinely useful.
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Article Analysis
Breaking Down the Elements
Main Idea
LLM Fluency Is an Illusion Produced by Human Projection, Not Machine Understanding
Shen’s central thesis is that LLMs produce text that appears meaningful because they match the surface patterns of human language — but meaning, as both Wittgenstein and neuroscience show, is rooted in embodied experience, preverbal cognition, and shared forms of life that LLMs completely lack. The sense of understanding we feel when reading LLM output is not evidence of the machine’s intelligence; it is evidence of our own irrepressible tendency to project inner life onto anything that speaks.
Purpose
To Equip Readers with a Philosophically Grounded View of AI’s Real Limits
Shen writes not to alarm or dismiss AI, but to equip readers with a genuinely grounded understanding of what LLMs are and aren’t — so they can use these tools intelligently rather than uncritically. Her purpose is epistemic correction: she wants readers to see clearly what the illusion is, where it comes from, and how to resist it — arriving at a pragmatic, confident relationship with AI rather than either fear or credulity.
Structure
Literary → Philosophical → Neuroscientific → Applied → Prescriptive
The essay opens with a literary anecdote (The Remains of the Day), introduces the philosophical framework (Wittgenstein’s language games), grounds it in neuroscience (Broca, Wernicke, distributed brain networks), applies both to diagnose LLMs’ limitations, and closes with pragmatic prescriptions for how to use AI wisely. This five-part Literary → Philosophical → Neuroscientific → Applied → Prescriptive structure mirrors the interdisciplinary ambition of the essay itself.
Tone
Intellectually Curious, Measured & Empowering
Shen’s tone is that of a thoughtful, well-read guide rather than a polemicist. She is genuinely curious about the philosophical and scientific questions she explores, and communicates them with accessible precision. The overall register is empowering rather than alarmist: the essay’s emotional destination is not anxiety about AI but confidence in human intelligence and the unique capacities that no statistical model can replicate.
Key Terms
Vocabulary from the Article
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Tough Words
Challenging Vocabulary
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Extremely delicate, light, and insubstantial — like gossamer spider’s silk; used by Michael Pollan to describe the barely-there, hard-to-pin-down quality of preverbal thoughts before they are translated into words.
“…a lot of my so-called thoughts — a flattering term for these gossamer traces of mental activity — are preverbal, often showing up as images, sensations, or concepts…”
Involving or requiring strenuous effort; difficult and tiring — used here to describe the taxing process writers undergo in translating preverbal experience and feeling into precise, finished language.
“From the writer’s perspective, it is a long, arduous process to put the story into the right words.”
The quality of being deep, insightful, or intellectually weighty; Wittgenstein uses this term to describe the false impression of depth that the orderly surface of language creates — an illusion of hidden meaning where none exists.
“The accuracy and order of sentences give humans the illusion of language’s profundity, leading philosophers to believe they could discover the underlying essence and hidden order in language itself.”
A region of damaged or abnormal tissue in the body, particularly the brain — in neuroscience, lesion studies examine which brain functions are lost when a specific area is damaged, revealing that area’s role in normal cognition.
“Following the patient’s death, Wernicke discovered a lesion in the posterior of the left superior temporal gyrus in the temporal lobe, near the auditory cortex.”
Extremely large in size, quantity, or extent — used here to describe the staggering volume of human-generated text that must be collected, processed, and converted into numerical arrays before LLMs can be trained.
“They rely on humans to collect, prepare, and pre-process a colossal amount of text into the required numerical arrays.”
In a strangely surprising or mysteriously apt way — going beyond what seems natural or expected; used here to describe how the distributed nature of language in the brain happens to align with Wittgenstein’s philosophical insight.
“This uncannily supports Wittgenstein’s claim that ‘the meaning of language is through everyday use.'”
Reading Comprehension
Test Your Understanding
5 questions covering different RC question types
1According to the article, Wernicke’s area in the brain is responsible for producing speech, while Broca’s area is responsible for language comprehension.
2According to Wittgenstein as described in the article, why have philosophers been unable to resolve questions like “What is justice?” or “What is beauty?” for over two thousand years?
3Which sentence best explains why LLMs are structurally incapable of genuine creativity, according to the article?
4Evaluate the following statements based on the article:
The article cites Adam Smith’s concept of imaginative projection — placing oneself in another’s situation — as the psychological mechanism that leads humans to attribute inner states to LLMs.
Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations was published during his lifetime and immediately recognised as a masterpiece by the philosophical community.
The article argues that neuroscience supports Wittgenstein by showing that language in the brain is distributed across multiple regions intertwined with non-linguistic functions, rather than localised in a single area.
Select True or False for all three statements, then click “Check Answers”
5What can be inferred about Shen’s view of the opening novel anecdote — reading The Remains of the Day — in relation to the article’s central argument about LLMs?
FAQ
Frequently Asked Questions
Wittgenstein’s “language games” captures the idea that language use is not a single, uniform activity with fixed rules but a family of diverse practices — each embedded in specific social contexts, purposes, and forms of life involving gestures, actions, and emotions. This matters for AI because LLMs can mimic the surface patterns of language games without actually participating in the forms of life that give them meaning. Humans play language games as embodied agents with real understanding; LLMs simulate the moves without inhabiting the game.
LLMs hallucinate because their outputs are generated by predicting statistically likely sequences of tokens — not by retrieving verified facts or forming beliefs with any commitment to truth. They have no judgment about what is true versus plausible. As OpenAI acknowledges, they produce fluent, confident statements that may be factually incorrect. The article implies this is a structural feature, not a solvable engineering bug, because the root cause is the absence of the real-world grounding and truth-motivation that distinguish human cognition.
Broca’s area, located in the left frontal lobe, is primarily involved in speech production — assembling words in the right sequence and syntax for articulation. Wernicke’s area, located in the left temporal lobe near the auditory cortex, is responsible for language comprehension — processing the intended meaning of words heard or read. The two areas are connected by the arcuate fasciculus, through which understood meaning flows from Wernicke’s area toward Broca’s area for verbal expression. Modern neuroscience has since shown both areas participate in more complex, distributed language networks.
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This article is rated Advanced. Readers must engage simultaneously with literary analysis, Wittgensteinian philosophy (language games, family resemblances, forms of life), and neuroscience (Broca’s area, Wernicke’s area, arcuate fasciculus, distributed networks), and then track how all three converge on a single argument about LLMs. The vocabulary is demanding throughout — gossamer, profundity, elucidation, preverbal, arcuate fasciculus — and the argument requires sustained attention across five distinct intellectual domains.
“Forms of life” is one of Wittgenstein’s most important concepts — it refers to the shared human practices, activities, and ways of living that provide the background against which language gets its meaning. Language is not self-contained; it is woven into the fabric of what humans do, how they interact, what they value, and how they respond to their world. This is why a phrase like “coffee’s aroma” means something different to a coffee drinker versus someone who has never smelled it — the words point toward a lived experience that cannot be transmitted through text alone.
The Ultimate Reading Course covers 9 RC question types: Multiple Choice, True/False, Multi-Statement T/F, Text Highlight, Fill in the Blanks, Matching, Sequencing, Error Spotting, and Short Answer. This comprehensive coverage prepares you for any reading comprehension format you might encounter.
