By that definition the LLM literally does not see anything. LLMs predict tokens. That's it.
The peephole will expand soon, as multimodal models come into their own, and as the models start getting mixed with robotics, allowing them to go and interact with the world more directly, instead of through the medium of human-written text.
The way we tokenize is just a design choice. Character level models(e.g. karpathy's nanoGPT) exist and are used for educational purpose. You can train it to count number of 'r' in a word.