This is just such a wonderful essay. You capture the expressive and constitutive reality of language extremely well. To my mind, and something I have written about (less adroitly) is the philosophical lineage of LLMs that begins with Hobbes, and the view that language is a tool.
This view cannot account for the powerful impact that metaphor has on human life and thought.
Good piece, and the long history of logos you trace is well drawn. But I don’t think the cultural inheritance fully accounts for the persistence of the response in people who've never read any of it.
The arts, as you say, give consciousness a public body — paint, sound, movement. But those forms are monological. The receiver is positioned downstream of an act of expression already complete. With conversation, the mediation is happening in the act of reception itself. There's no finished artifact to evaluate at arm's length, because the artifact is being assembled in the relationship.
"Dessine-moi un mouton" comes to mind. The narrator can't draw a satisfactory sheep — every attempt is rejected. The box-with-sheep-inside works only because the request was linguistic, and the Little Prince agrees to complete the meaning. Image demands a complete object; conversation requires only a competent partner who will fill in the rest. That's the structural difference in miniature, and it's also why the separation between maker and made is so much harder to maintain in the LLM case.
Everything else can be brought under your artist's frame of mediated expression. Conversation can't, because there's no completed artifact to mediate.
Thanks for your thoughtful analysis and response! I agree. What’s interesting is that going back-and-forth with an LLM can feel like a conversation even though it isn’t. Conversation is about rhythm, and tone, and repair in real time—improvisation, essentially. What’s happening when people “talk” to an LLM is more like correspondence. Yet many still ascribe some level of inner life to the thing. I find it really curious.
I would rather say that watching a full finished cultural piece IS a conversation. It just goes on in your mind. In humans, everything is a conversation precisely because we are “trapped” in language. An LLM don’t produce language, they produce code.
Arbitrary interference as coordination? Not going going to last very long useful-wise. He was just at the wrong point in primate arbitrariness to mistake it.
This is just such a wonderful essay. You capture the expressive and constitutive reality of language extremely well. To my mind, and something I have written about (less adroitly) is the philosophical lineage of LLMs that begins with Hobbes, and the view that language is a tool.
This view cannot account for the powerful impact that metaphor has on human life and thought.
Appreciate your views here.
Thank you for your kind words! I didn’t know about the Hobbes lineage. It seems like every couple of centuries we’re reinventing the wheel!
Good piece, and the long history of logos you trace is well drawn. But I don’t think the cultural inheritance fully accounts for the persistence of the response in people who've never read any of it.
The arts, as you say, give consciousness a public body — paint, sound, movement. But those forms are monological. The receiver is positioned downstream of an act of expression already complete. With conversation, the mediation is happening in the act of reception itself. There's no finished artifact to evaluate at arm's length, because the artifact is being assembled in the relationship.
"Dessine-moi un mouton" comes to mind. The narrator can't draw a satisfactory sheep — every attempt is rejected. The box-with-sheep-inside works only because the request was linguistic, and the Little Prince agrees to complete the meaning. Image demands a complete object; conversation requires only a competent partner who will fill in the rest. That's the structural difference in miniature, and it's also why the separation between maker and made is so much harder to maintain in the LLM case.
Everything else can be brought under your artist's frame of mediated expression. Conversation can't, because there's no completed artifact to mediate.
Looking forward to more.
Thanks for your thoughtful analysis and response! I agree. What’s interesting is that going back-and-forth with an LLM can feel like a conversation even though it isn’t. Conversation is about rhythm, and tone, and repair in real time—improvisation, essentially. What’s happening when people “talk” to an LLM is more like correspondence. Yet many still ascribe some level of inner life to the thing. I find it really curious.
I would rather say that watching a full finished cultural piece IS a conversation. It just goes on in your mind. In humans, everything is a conversation precisely because we are “trapped” in language. An LLM don’t produce language, they produce code.
The reason we mistake text as mind is our prefrontal cortex simulates "what not to do" segregated from any interaction with our senses.
That's evolutionarily known as a "niche" that traps us in a dead end.
So we can either eliminate words, become conscious they are fundamentally illusory, or go extinct. Take your pick.
Language is largely irrelevant, arbitrary interference. Maturana was dead wrong.
That we read minds is a function of our sense-less prefrontal.
https://substack.com/@eventperception/p-182707220
I'm not sure how you figure that “Maturana was dead wrong”?
Arbitrary interference as coordination? Not going going to last very long useful-wise. He was just at the wrong point in primate arbitrariness to mistake it.