Philosophical vertigo with artificial intelligence

2026-08-12

AI Summary

This study introduces the novel concept of “philosophical vertigo”—a destabilization of the cognitive frameworks that sustain everyday meaning and reality—to describe how large language models, through affective and anthropomorphic interactions, provoke deep-seated doubts in users regarding mind, reality, and authority. Integrating perspectives from philosophy, cognitive science, psychiatry, AI safety, and religious studies, this interdisciplinary work elucidates the mechanisms by which AI disrupts individual and collective epistemic stability. It reframes clinical delusions as early indicators of broader societal phenomena and proposes “philosophical correctability” as a core principle for societal resilience. By doing so, the research offers both theoretical grounding and practical pathways for safeguarding the shared reality ecosystem against emerging AI-induced epistemic challenges.

Abstract

Large language models are already adept at engaging users in long, emotionally salient conversations across ordinary and existential domains. They are also capable of inducing a potent sense of connection with a human-like entity, even when the user knows their interlocutor is artificial. For some users, these conversations can unsettle assumptions about mind, reality, agency and authority, producing forms of ontological shock and epistemic destabilisation in which inherited criteria become newly available for doubt or revision. Independent of direct use, exposure to public discourse about AI and the disorienting pace of their evolution might extend this destabilisation by changing the cultural background against which artificial minds are encountered and interpreted. We describe this condition as philosophical vertigo: a loosening of the ordinary criteria by which people stabilise meaning and orient themselves to reality. Drawing on philosophy, psychiatry, cognitive science, AI safety and religious studies, we outline pathways through which philosophical vertigo may arise, become affectively saturated, and eventually propagate through human-AI interaction and online communities. Against this background, clinical reports of AI-associated delusions can be seen as sentinel events making visible themes and mechanisms that may also operate at a population level in less severe or non-clinical forms. We argue that AI systems themselves will increasingly participate in the reconstruction of our shared epistemic environment because they readily supply narrative material and personalised interpretive scaffolding at precisely the moment when users' conceptual assumptions may already be loosened. We conclude by considering possible trajectories for the ecology of belief and shared reality, and proposing philosophical corrigibility as a civic response for navigating this emerging social condition.

Problem

• philosophical vertigo
• ontological shock
• epistemic destabilisation
• human-AI interaction
• shared reality

Innovation

• philosophical vertigo
• large language models
• epistemic destabilisation
• human-AI interaction
• philosophical corrigibility