The AI-Induced Subjectivity Crisis Series, Paper 4: The Technologization of Transcendental Illusion: LLMs, Epistemological Disguise, and the Failure of Kantian Self-Reflection

This paper constitutes Paper 4 of the AI-Induced Subjectivity Crisis Series. This paper argues that large language models (LLMs) do not merely trigger Kant's transcendental illusion (transzendentaler Schein) but structurally eliminate its self-visibility — a qualitative transformation that Kant's own critical framework was not designed to detect. The argument proceeds in five stages. First, Kant's theory of transcendental illusion is reconstructed with precision, identifying two implicit presuppositions on which its analytical power depends: that illusion is produced within the subject, and that the reality feedback mechanism constitutes external counterbalance. Second, the reality feedback mechanism is established as a necessary structural support of the Kantian framework, and the conditions of its weakening in open-interpretive domains are analyzed. Third, two mechanisms — epistemological disguise and cognitive isomorphization — are introduced to explain how LLMs achieve a qualitative rather than quantitative transformation of transcendental illusion: the former eliminates metacognitive distance by presenting LLM outputs under the guise of scientific objectivity; the latter describes the dynamic convergence of LLM outputs with the user's cognitive framework over time, constituting a double-layered illusion structure in which the illusion of externality systematically forecloses recognition of the illusion beneath it. Fourth, the concept of pseudo-metacognition is introduced to show that Kant's critical weapon — self-reflection — does not merely fail in the LLM context but undergoes a three-stage degradation: substituted, disguised as effective, and through cognitive isomorphization progressively reforged into an instrument of illusion reinforcement. Fifth, the failure of the Kantian framework is precisely located as historically conditional rather than theoretically internal, and three directions for supplementation are proposed. The paper's central contribution is diagnostic: it shifts the analysis of LLMs' epistemological consequences away from questions of consciousness and content accuracy toward the structural effects LLMs exert on human cognitive subjects — effects that persist independently of whether LLM outputs are accurate and independently of whether LLMs possess understanding.