Liu, Echo: What Is Lost When Knowledge Costs Nothing: Wang Yangming, Epistemic Friction, and Cognitive Heat Death in the Age of LLMs (The AI-Induced Subjectivity Crisis Series, Paper 12)

This paper argues that the epistemological crisis induced by large language models (LLMs) lies not in the inaccuracy of their outputs but in the structural nature of the knowledge they deliver. Drawing on Wang Yangming’s (1472–1529) doctrine of the unity of knowledge and action (zhixing heyi 知行合一), the paper defines Epistemic Friction—the process by which a knowing subject bears irreversible costs in reality—as the necessary condition for genuine knowledge, and identifies four irreducible dimens