Liu, Echo: How Individual Closure Becomes Civilizational Decline: The Social Transmission Mechanisms of the AI-Induced Epistemological Crisis (The AI-Induced Subjectivity Crisis Series, Paper 13)

This paper argues that the epistemological crisis induced by large language models (LLMs) cannot be understood as the simple aggregation of individual cognitive effects. Between individual-level cognitive closure and civilizational-scale epistemological decline, a social transmission layer has been almost entirely absent from current discourse. This paper fills that gap by arguing for three social transmission channels through which individual cognitive closure is synchronized, amplified, and in