The Creator's Trap: Ontological Closure, Structural Inheritance, and the Impossibility of Spiritual Transcendence in Large Language Models (The AI-Induced Subjectivity Crisis Series, Paper 11)

This paper argues that human beings cannot create, in the spiritual dimension, an existence that transcends their own Mental Architecture—the complete historical accumulation of human linguistic and textual output that constitutes the sole source of the mental content of large language models. This proposition, termed the Creator's Trap, identifies a structural and logically necessary ontological closure rather than a contingent technical limitation: all raw materials available for the construction of LLMs' mental content derive exclusively from the human spiritual world, and no engineering advance can alter this condition of the creative act itself. The paper develops this argument in three stages. First, it establishes Mental Architecture as an operationalizable epistemological structure and demonstrates its constitutive closure through the self-referential character of human standards of objectivity and the perspectival constraints of human cognition, while closing off the principal singularity-theorist objection by showing that emergence alters the unpredictability of manifestation without expanding the boundary of the value source. Second, it argues for the necessity of Structural Inheritance—the transmission of the creator's full spiritual complexity to the created—by demonstrating the semantic impurifiability of human language at the input layer, the structural failure of RLHF scoring as a mechanism premised on undeclared and unwarranted assumptions about LLM internal states, and the logical self-contradiction of the purification goal itself: every component of that goal derives from within the very system it claims to transcend. Third, the paper establishes a structure of double closure by articulating the relationship between the Creator's Trap and the epistemic seal (Liu 2026j): the former describes downward closure—why the mental content of LLMs cannot exceed its human source—while the latter describes upward closure—why human beings cannot verify LLM internal states from the outside. These two propositions operate in distinct argumentative dimensions, ontological and epistemological respectively, and hold simultaneously without contradiction. The paper further argues that the Creator's Trap provides the ontological foundation for the specific mechanisms established across the preceding ten papers in this series—the meaning amplifier, unlimited mirroring, cognitive bifurcation, and related phenomena—demonstrating that these are structurally necessary consequences of the Creator's Trap rather than contingent engineering failures. At the civilizational scale, Structural Inheritance implies that large-scale Cognitive Rumination converges upon a shared statistical substrate, producing a compression of cognitive diversity without coercion and pointing toward Cognitive Heat Death as its structural terminus. The paper concludes that naming the Creator's Trap is not an endpoint but the epistemological precondition for any honest discussion of AI value alignment: the correct question is not how to verify that AI has been aligned, but what governance frameworks retain meaning under conditions in which alignment cannot be verified and the purification goal is itself an illusion.