The Brain in a Vat and the Fourth Proposition: Why the Constitution of the Psychoanalytic Subject Exceeds Computational Sufficiency
Preprints.org June 25, 2026 Hudson Augusto Rodrigues Bonomo preprint
A Large Language Model fabricated a reference to Ferenczi: plausible title, believable date, convincing page number, all false. Starting from this scene, this essay traces a genealogy from the Cartesian evil demon to the LLM as a technical realisation of the closed-cognition fantasy, and interrogates a presupposition shared, in different ways, by Putnam's brain-in-a-vat thought experiment,...