ChatGPT answers metaphysical questions :)

[Federica]

The idea of "inaccurate illustration of symbol" is very internally dissonant to me. It concatenates first order content level (realm of 'facts') of "accurate vs inaccurate" with second order imaginative level of illustrating what the facts could symbolically mean. There can be better or worse illustrations in various contexts, misleading illustrations when not accompanied with enough context (but a lot of this also depends on the recipient thinker's habits), and so on, but I wouldn't call it inaccurate and would try not to let the perceived quality of the illustration deviate my thinking too far from the spirit in which it is offered.

I also don't think the experiential contentions he outlines are a matter of opinion.

For me, what JP says in that quote seems self-evident, of course if we take words like 'coding', 'network', 'stacked discs', and so forth as symbols for non-computational spiritual processes, as we normally do on this forum. I mean, what else could the words and sequences of words be reflecting back except the 'implicit structure of meaning' at some scale of inner activity? I find what he says in this clip to be another way of speaking about the (potentially) concentrically aligned spheres of inner activity (intellectual/linguistic, imaginal, and beyond), which he describes as 'isomorphic' (which is also the term he used in the interview with Hoffman to question the latter's dashboard illusionism, where the 'noumenal' network of CAs is considered entirely orthogonal to our ordinary cognitive activity). We may speak of these as the self-similar temporal rhythms across all scales, which are also spatialized at our intellectual scale. Even our prosaic word sequences preserve these isomorphic narrative patterns to some extent, although usually in hardly recognizable form. Something lIke LLM helps brings that implicit narrative form more into focus by training on infinite sequences.

And I think we have all spoken about this relationship in respect to LLMs in various ways and at various times:

Cleric: What I have found of value is to contemplate how our human knowledge dispersed through the Internet (on which the GPT model is trained) has been compressed into different categories...Chatting with GPT may provide an interesting experience for some people. This can happen only if we're willing to learn something about ourselves... If we approach GPT with willingness to learn something about the way we tick, we'll soon have the strange feeling how in the language model have been summarized the main channels in which human cognition flows. This shouldn't be confused with explanation how our cognition works. It's only an abstract categorization of the main patterns in which present humanity's thinking flows... In a way GPT can stimulate us to feel certain shame when we see how superficially we spend our lives in the linguistic labyrinth. This might inspire us to seek what our true human worth is about.

Federica: They do illustrate and reveal, in their makeup, the quality of certain human cognitive patterns...

I see JP using GPT/AI in a same mirror-like way for ordinary cognitive pathways and, most importantly, his aim is to inspire listeners in a direction away from postmodern power narratives, where our identity fragments more and more into horizontally competing "interpretations" of reality based on uexamined soul factors, toward our more integrated archetypal nature where we are swimming in the shared moral intuitions that structure reality and naturally lose interest in the power games.

Generally speaking, through our modern scientific thinking, we are finding ways of conducting more of the implicit cognitive structure, mediated by our intellectual symbols, through the bodily will into our technologies as consciousness grows in resonance with the etheric spectrum (just as we see with Levin's research). It's only a matter of how conscious we can become that this is happening and JP is more conscious of it than many other current intellectual thinkers. For example we can notice the alignment of this clip on dreams (imaginal space) with spiritual scientific understanding, i.e. how the former overlaps with and modulates our intellectual-artistic thinking space:





Clearly JP's intuition of these things is not as fleshed out and refined as ours, nor does he suspect the isomorphically nested scales can be cognitively experienced beyond our nebulous intuition of their existence. He doesn't suspect they can come 'into focus' at our cognitive horizon in the same way as our inner voice is currently in focus. That's why the intuition remains rather nebulous. Yet, beyond that, I see no reason to be surprised at his comments on LLM which, for me, are entirely in keeping with his overall spiritual outlook which discerns continuity between the archetypal moral/value spheres of activity (symbolic world) and the perceptual flow of daily experience which we commonly associate with a 'material world' (the objective realm of facts, as he usually puts it).

I will add that it's slightly possible he is overestimating how much a technology like LLM can explain 'how cognition works', since like most people he is tempted to conceive of higher-order scales as similar to our familiar intellectual-linguistic movements in many ways, although I am not sure about that and I think other discussions have highlighted how he is wary of reducing the Spirit to our standard conceptions and rational movements. Fundamentally I think he is safeguarded more than others from the reductive intellectual tendency through his explicit allegiance to emulating the Christ impulse across the layers of thinking-feeling-willing.

PS - did you notice what he says around 5:50 min in that clip? "there's nothing arbitrary about that, there's no 'the meaning is only in the text' - that's the ultimate claim of the disembodied, rational, prideful intellect... 'it's all in the words', like no, no no..."

It’s ironic that you decided to split hairs with the word “accurate”, since I started using it in the way I did with the purpose of aligning my vocabulary to yours, and hopefully make myself better understood That’s why I've lately been using it in the sense of softly said "wrong", though in my books this has never been what "accurate" means. It’s a Latin word. To me it screams: “cura" meaning "care" and so for me "accurate" means done with care and with attention to details. Anyway, beyond this fun fact, there isn't much more to say.

JP equates words and concepts,
and you say: “indisputable”


JP says we can use LLMs to evaluate the implicit structure of meaning for the first time effectively,
(evidently meaning we can use the outputs of LLMs as such, while what you quoted from Cleric and me refers to the level of what LLM technology can tell about the present directions of our collective consciousness)
and you say “self-evident”

I mean, what else could the words and sequences of words be reflecting back except the 'implicit structure of meaning' at some scale of inner activity?

They reflect back nothing, as such. There is nothing in the sequences per se. We can only learn from these tools if we look beyond the word sequences, into the why and how the tool has been conceived. You know this very well, but prefer to ignore that JP is not talking about that. He is talking about really doing statistical analysis of the LLMs linguistic outputs and extracting from that output a demonstration of human ideas to slap in the face of opponents as objective mapping. There’s no meaning in words per se, there is only meaning in ideas. And, as Steiner says, people are more and more attached to mere words nowadays. They think in words (I mean "we" of course, I do it all the time too) which means they don’t think at all, and so nothing of the realm of ideas can be mapped in that wordy output.

Yes I noticed those words at 5:50. I think he means that the word layer at the top of his hierarchy doesn’t only work in isolation, but if something is true at linguistic level, it will infuse with truth the imaginative level underneath it, and further down the behavioral and material layer according to his pyramid of reality. He realizes that reality must be interconnected, but again, he mixes up semantics with ideas, and erroneously puts words (semantics) on the highest pedestal.

[AshvinP]

They reflect back nothing, as such. There is nothing in the sequences per se. We can only learn from these tools if we look beyond the word sequences, into the why and how the tool has been conceived. You know this very well, but prefer to ignore that JP is not talking about that. He is talking about really doing statistical analysis of the LLMs linguistic outputs and extracting from that output a demonstration of human ideas to slap in the face of opponents as objective mapping. There’s no meaning in words per se, there is only meaning in ideas. And, as Steiner says, people are more and more attached to mere words nowadays. They think in words (I mean "we" of course, I do it all the time too) which means they don’t think at all, and so nothing of the realm of ideas can be mapped in that wordy output.

Yes I noticed those words at 5:50. I think he means that the word layer at the top of his hierarchy doesn’t only work in isolation, but if something is true at linguistic level, it will infuse with truth the imaginative level underneath it, and further down the behavioral and material layer according to his pyramid of reality. He realizes that reality must be interconnected, but again, he mixes up semantics with ideas, and erroneously puts words (semantics) on a pedestal.

It's interesting that in the discussion on Levin, you concluded with 100% confidence he was approaching the algorithmic research as merely a symbol that could prove useful for non-reduced scales of inner activity (biological scale), and with JP you are concluding the opposite - he is interested in reducing everything to the word-semantic level 'at the top of his hierarchy' and thinks LLM analysis will be the ultimate scientific means of doing so. We already saw that your conclusion on Levin was off base, and in fact his approach was more similar to what you are now ascribing to JP.

Besides that, I have noticed you have been reactively critical to any of my comments that suggest 'smooth continuity' between the symbolic world (deeper scales of inner activity) and the linguistic scale of ordinary cognition. In the discussion with Eugene, you were also emphasizing how we need to 'leave behind' or 'let go' of the ordinary brain-bound linguistic pictures (of course, this can be a useful way of expressing the path to higher cognition within a limited context). Now you are highly critical of JP for suggesting a continuous link between the ordinary linguistic pathways and the ideal domain of meaning.

These are just observations to contemplate because I think they tell an interesting story, but it's up to you to discern what that story could be. Here are some other facts and thoughts:

1/ JP is trained out of Jungian depth psychology, so it's obvious he doesn't regard the word-layer (rational-linguistic scale) 'at the top of his hierarchy'. Jungian thought is generally characterized by regarding the rational-linguistic layer as the most surface intellectual patina (commentary) on deeper meaningful scales of activity which grow increasingly collective and are embodied in mythic-religious images. The biological-material layer is considered reflective of these archetypal scales, just as it is more intimately discerned through spiritual science.

2/ No matter how associative and mechanical our 'wordy output' becomes, it must still reflect back the 'realm of ideas', the narrative patterns of meaning drawn from the higher scales. Those higher scales will be totally obscured from view if our attention is fixated on the content of our wordy output, but it is nevertheless implicit and would become more apparent if we redirected attention to the discernible patterns of this output. As JP indicated, this is what we have always been doing instinctively through our thoughtful inquiries, 'mapping out' our own inner meaningful structure and movements within the World state (like literary critics, but also everything other field of inquiry), and LLM could just become another conscious tool for that if we implement it honestly and with this explicit aim.

3/ I don't think JP was speaking of statistically analyzing the output of LLM, but rather using LLM to statistically analyze the textual (and perhaps image-based) output of human beings. (not too much unlike what Cleric recently did for his essays). That is brought out more clearly in this clip (where he is also clearly sounding the alarm):





4/ "Without that coding [of meaningful narratives], the language wouldn't be comprehensible" - this is PoF 101. Without the conceptual intuition encoded in our linguistic perceptions, they wouldn't be comprehensible. This is how the complex structure of language is learned and made sensible through childhood. We have spoken before of the meaningful aspect incarnating in the 'liminal spaces' between words, phrases, sentences, etc., and that's what JP is pointing to. We have also used the 'encoded' metaphor for linguistic thoughts many times before, precisely for encoding a 'cloud of images' in which our soul being weaves. Words are essentially concepts, of course not the mere audial or visual perception, but the meaningful aspect reflected in the perceptions.


As I said before, it's quite possible JP (along with many others) are overestimating what AI/LLM will be capable of in the next few years, what kind of productive (or harmful) uses they can be employed for, and so on, but I don't see any hint of fundamentally reducing human or higher spiritual activity to the mere statistical output and concluding the essence of cognition and its functioning is contained within the latter. In other words, although JP may sometimes refer to AI as "intelligent", I don't think he assumes they can autonomously emerge into their own goal space independently of human intelligence and goals.

[Federica]

It's interesting that in the discussion on Levin, you concluded with 100% confidence he was approaching the algorithmic research as merely a symbol that could prove useful for non-reduced scales of inner activity (biological scale), and with JP you are concluding the opposite - he is interested in reducing everything to the word-semantic level 'at the top of his hierarchy' and thinks LLM analysis will be the ultimate scientific means of doing so. We already saw that your conclusion on Levin was off base, and in fact his approach was more similar to what you are now ascribing to JP.

Besides that, I have noticed you have been reactively critical to any of my comments that suggest 'smooth continuity' between the symbolic world (deeper scales of inner activity) and the linguistic scale of ordinary cognition. In the discussion with Eugene, you were also emphasizing how we need to 'leave behind' or 'let go' of the ordinary brain-bound linguistic pictures (of course, this can be a useful way of expressing the path to higher cognition within a limited context). Now you are highly critical of JP for suggesting a continuous link between the ordinary linguistic pathways and the ideal domain of meaning.

These are just observations to contemplate because I think they tell an interesting story, but it's up to you to discern what that story could be. Here are some other facts and thoughts:

1/ JP is trained out of Jungian depth psychology, so it's obvious he doesn't regard the word-layer (rational-linguistic scale) 'at the top of his hierarchy'. Jungian thought is generally characterized by regarding the rational-linguistic layer as the most surface intellectual patina (commentary) on deeper meaningful scales of activity which grow increasingly collective and are embodied in mythic-religious images. The biological-material layer is considered reflective of these archetypal scales, just as it is more intimately discerned through spiritual science.

2/ No matter how associative and mechanical our 'wordy output' becomes, it must still reflect back the 'realm of ideas', the narrative patterns of meaning drawn from the higher scales. Those higher scales will be totally obscured from view if our attention is fixated on the content of our wordy output, but it is nevertheless implicit and would become more apparent if we redirected attention to the discernible patterns of this output. As JP indicated, this is what we have always been doing instinctively through our thoughtful inquiries, 'mapping out' our own inner meaningful structure and movements within the World state (like literary critics, but also everything other field of inquiry), and LLM could just become another conscious tool for that if we implement it honestly and with this explicit aim.

3/ I don't think JP was speaking of statistically analyzing the output of LLM, but rather using LLM to statistically analyze the textual (and perhaps image-based) output of human beings. (not too much unlike what Cleric recently did for his essays). That is brought out more clearly in this clip (where he is also clearly sounding the alarm):





4/ "Without that coding [of meaningful narratives], the language wouldn't be comprehensible" - this is PoF 101. Without the conceptual intuition encoded in our linguistic perceptions, they wouldn't be comprehensible. This is how the complex structure of language is learned and made sensible through childhood. We have spoken before of the meaningful aspect incarnating in the 'liminal spaces' between words, phrases, sentences, etc., and that's what JP is pointing to. We have also used the 'encoded' metaphor for linguistic thoughts many times before, precisely for encoding a 'cloud of images' in which our soul being weaves. Words are essentially concepts, of course not the mere audial or visual perception, but the meaningful aspect reflected in the perceptions.


As I said before, it's quite possible JP (along with many others) are overestimating what AI/LLM will be capable of in the next few years, what kind of productive (or harmful) uses they can be employed for, and so on, but I don't see any hint of fundamentally reducing human or higher spiritual activity to the mere statistical output and concluding the essence of cognition and its functioning is contained within the latter. In other words, although JP may sometimes refer to AI as "intelligent", I don't think he assumes they can autonomously emerge into their own goal space independently of human intelligence and goals.

There is such an amount of arbitrariness packed in the above, that I wouldn't even know where to start. I actually won't start. Not because I’m afraid of hard work, which I am not, never was, but because I see you have now slipped into your patronizing, superior character, which I am familiar with. And I know with great level of confidence that it would be of no constructive use to engage in any of the thoughts you have laid out here. It would only be consuming. You are never wrong anyway, never have been, and most obviously never will. Besides, you can surely picture to yourself another chapter of the interesting story of my tortuous thinking existence, as you often do. But it's certainly not up to me to discern what that story could be.

[Federica]

I also want to share this lecture by JP, which gives a broad overview of his intuitions, ideas, and his general way of thinking through them. I think we can easily discern the resonance with PoF-style phenomenology. One can use the time-stamps to skip around - particularly the sections on microcosm/macrocosm, what matters vs. matter, what dispels pain, stories and narratives as the lens through which we perceive the World (in a very literal sense), the Spirit that you walk with. That last section particularly highlights his phenomenological psycho-spiritual approach which he says is not a "secondary overlay" on reality but is primary.

(we can move this to a different thread since it's not directly speaking to AI/LLM)

I have watched about half of the lecture. In this first part, I think there are valuable ideas (like the ideas around perception and the role of time in it) mixed with less phenomenological thoughts, more tinted with pre-conceptions, like those on unnecessary suffering and on semantics (“What’s real isn’t obvious because it depends on how you define the term”).
I should mention that, after a rather composed beginning, the presentation tone becomes so theatrical, so nervous, he is so yelling at the audience that it's challenging to remain focused on the ideas and ignore the continuous lashing of his abrasive voice. I held out for a while, but I really don't see why endure that for an hour. Why are you so unconditionally fond of JP? I have no idea, but in your shoes I would ask myself the question.

[AshvinP]

I have watched about half of the lecture. In this first part, I think there are valuable ideas (like the ideas around perception and the role of time in it) mixed with less phenomenological thoughts, more tinted with pre-conceptions, like those on unnecessary suffering and on semantics (“What’s real isn’t obvious because it depends on how you define the term”).
I should mention that, after a rather composed beginning, the presentation tone becomes so theatrical, so nervous, he is so yelling at the audience that it's challenging to remain focused on the ideas and ignore the continuous lashing of his abrasive voice. I held out for a while, but I really don't see why endure that for an hour. His family friends and fans can do it. I personally prefer to use my energy at other tasks. Why are you so unconditionally fond of JP? I have no idea, but in your shoes I would ask myself the question.

Because I try to resist my personal feelings, antipathies, sensitivities, non-contextual opinions, and so forth, and correspondingly look beyond other people's personal flaws, limitations, and shortcomings to the spirit of their ideas and corresponding insights. I don't like it when my lower nature deprives me of invaluable spiritual resources, such as one of the central intellectual thinkers who embodies the Christ impulse in our time. I feel that is one of the prime strategies of the adversaries who comprise our personalized soul curvatures and I have no desire to keep playing right into this obvious strategy. All too often we justify our fear of confronting our deeper soul movements by externalizing blame onto others, trying to pick apart their speech to find errors and faults, focusing all our attention on the word-layer of their speech while simultaneously accusing them of doing the same thing, but that is anathema to the Impulse and will keep us oscillating around the Guardian indefinitely.

That doesn't mean I follow all current thinkers unconditionally, but if someone's style doesn't resonate with me, I don't go out of my way to form and vocalize critical opinions of them. Such opinions inevitably reflect more about us than they do about the person in question.

[Federica]

I have watched about half of the lecture. In this first part, I think there are valuable ideas (like the ideas around perception and the role of time in it) mixed with less phenomenological thoughts, more tinted with pre-conceptions, like those on unnecessary suffering and on semantics (“What’s real isn’t obvious because it depends on how you define the term”).
I should mention that, after a rather composed beginning, the presentation tone becomes so theatrical, so nervous, he is so yelling at the audience that it's challenging to remain focused on the ideas and ignore the continuous lashing of his abrasive voice. I held out for a while, but I really don't see why endure that for an hour. His family friends and fans can do it. I personally prefer to use my energy at other tasks. Why are you so unconditionally fond of JP? I have no idea, but in your shoes I would ask myself the question.

Because I try to resist my personal feelings, antipathies, sensitivities, non-contextual opinions, and so forth, and correspondingly look beyond other people's personal flaws, limitations, and shortcomings to the spirit of their ideas and corresponding insights. I don't like it when my lower nature deprives me of invaluable spiritual resources, such as one of the central intellectual thinkers who embodies the Christ impulse in our time. I feel that is one of the prime strategies of the adversaries who comprise our personalized soul curvatures and I have no desire to keep playing right into this obvious strategy. All too often we justify our fear of confronting our deeper soul movements by externalizing blame onto others, trying to pick apart their speech to find errors and faults, focusing all our attention on the word-layer of their speech while simultaneously accusing them of doing the same thing, but that is anathema to the Impulse and will keep us oscillating around the Guardian indefinitely.

That doesn't mean I follow all current thinkers unconditionally, but if someone's style doesn't resonate with me, I don't go out of my way to form and vocalize critical opinions of them. Such opinions inevitably reflect more about us than they do about the person in question.

You may not mind the nested self-contradictory nature of these thoughts just yet, but you are to, since these are already not yours.

[Federica]

3/ I don't think JP was speaking of statistically analyzing the output of LLM, but rather using LLM to statistically analyze the textual (and perhaps image-based) output of human beings. (not too much unlike what Cleric recently did for his essays). That is brought out more clearly in this clip (where he is also clearly sounding the alarm):

Precisely. He thinks that we can meaningfully use LLMs outputs as such to statistically analyse the textual output of human beings, and - here comes the crucial part - he thinks we can recover some extract of the nature of meaning from such an analysis. This is wildly different from what Cleric does. JP best reveals his conception when he gives the witch example, in the other video. There, it's clear how he thinks that the statistical summary provided by GPT has something to teach us about what the meaning of witch is, how it comes about, which is a common but clear misunderstanding of what "semantics" and language are. To make it very concrete, coming back to this video above, he says:


“...the degree Chat GPT is intelligent is because of the intelligence that's encoded only in language, and if the linguistic corpus of the body of text that we've all produced is biased and warped in some way that'll be built into the chat GPT system and along with whatever biases the programmers might have purposely or inadvertently put into the system.”


Again, the same problem: there is no meaning “encoded only in language”. The only reason language makes sense to us, if it does, is because we already hold real meaning. Meaning can go down from reality into language, but it cannot go back up from language into reality. This JP doesn’t realize. We have seen this misunderstanding now multiple times in different contexts. There is no two-way connection between reality and its linguistic outpression. There’s a check valve in between. Nothing standalone is “encoded” in language. There can only be a recognition in language. This can happen only IF the intelligence is already somehow else acquainted with meaning. If this is not the case, language alone leads nowhere, it’s a huis clos. There are openings, but one can only open them from the outside in, not from the inside out.

Put another way, language only holds half of the code, or rather a feel for the code. So all those statistical interrelations that JP wonders about don’t allow to build back anything of the quality of real meaning, but rather semi-conscious associations, operated, we could say, while "lost in translation”, lost in the linguistic layer. It’s a sort of dream world of its own, the dream of language. This layer can easily be experienced pretty much exclusively horizontally, in isolation from meaning. Then language is perfectly useless for the purpose of moving vertically, beyond the level of that dream, and up towards some recovery of living meaning.

Now, this life of dreaming in language is the vast majority of contemporary language use. However, even if GPT was trained only on the very best texts - let’s imagine a PoF Bot - no meaning will be contained in those outputs either. Because, if we really want to break it down pedantically, there are two problems. The first: there is that check valve. Just because one reads PoF doesn’t mean one gets it: one has to first overcome one’s own personal linguistic dreaming habits. And the same would be true with the PoF bot, of course, so no use. On top of that, the second problem is added to the first one, when GPT is trained on immense amounts of texted material: the regularities then discovered are only a measure of the average linguistic bubble our usual consciousness dreams up around symbols. So there’s an additional step away from relevant meaning.

JP doesn’t see all that. He’s rather captive of the wow narrative, the Alice in Wonderland narrative around these models, and really believes there is meaningful potential in the outputs that summarize human linguistic daydreaming. He really thinks this summary will bring light to what the real meaning of "witch" is. And to conclude his train of thought, it’s enough to put AI and images together, in this fascinating futuristic narrative, for the first example to come to mind to be sexual, of course. A GPT sexual partner and a fake video looking like a real speech by the real DT, are the two examples he brings, when asked about the future of AI, and the pros and cons of this technology for humanity. I'll leave the punchline to your imagination.

[AshvinP]

...

Ok, Federica, instead of jumping on the assertions above that I feel are problematic, as I usually do, I will instead ask you to elaborate your meaning on a couple points. As a preliminary note, JP says that ChatGPT is only trained on language, so it's "intelligence" can only be reflective of linguistic cognition. He doesn't say "meaning is encoded only in language", and in fact his point is the opposite of that - that AI can grow more "intelligent" in its ability to map out meaning if it is trained on images as well. So I hope that misunderstanding is cleared.

Besides that, please elaborate on what is meant by the phrases below. You can add whatever thoughts and examples you feel are relevant, but I will also provide some questions to indicate what is generally confusing me.

1/ "Meaning can go down from reality into language, but it cannot go back up from language into reality... There is no two-way connection between reality and its linguistic outpression. There’s a check valve in between"

What exactly is the differentiation being made here between "reality" and "language"? How is it that the outputs of our linguistic cognition cannot work back into the intuitive meaning we steer through with that linguistic cognition?

2/ "So all those statistical interrelations that JP wonders about don’t allow to build back anything of the quality of real meaning, but rather semi-conscious associations, operated, we could say, while "lost in translation” lost in the linguistic layer. It’s a sort of dream world of its own, the dream of language. This can easily be experienced pretty much exclusively horizontally, in isolation from meaning, in which case it's perfectly useless for the purpose of moving vertically, beyond the level of that dream, and up into some recovery of living meaning."

How can a domain of experience, no matter how associative and dreamy it is (and I think every strata of meaning is instinctive and dreamy in in relation to more integrated strata), be isolated from meaning? When we make mechanical, associative, dreamy thought-connections of experience through our ordinary linguistic cognition, are these completely isolated from the meaningful experience itself?

3/JP doesn’t see all that. He’s rather captive of the wow narrative around these models, and really believes there is meaningful potential in the outputs that summarize human linguistic daydreaming. It really thinks this summary will bring light to what the real meaning of "witch" is.

How would you characterize the meaning of "witch"? What relation does that meaning have to our linguistic daydreaming?

And to conclude his train of thought, it’s enough to put AI and images together in the futuristic narrative, for the first example to come to mind to be sexual of course. A GPT sexual partner and a fake video looking like a real speech by the real DT, are the two examples he brings, when asked about the future of AI, and the pros and cons of this technology for homanity.

I mean, this is obvious, is it not? That's exactly what the first and primary uses will be by most people (and perhaps are already), especially the increasingly lonely and alienated people he uses in the example.

[Federica]

Ok, Federica, instead of jumping on the assertions above that I feel are problematic, as I usually do, I will instead ask you to elaborate your meaning on a couple points. As a preliminary note, JP says that ChatGPT is only trained on language, so it's "intelligence" can only be reflective of linguistic cognition. He doesn't say "meaning is encoded only in language", and in fact his point is the opposite of that - that AI can grow more "intelligent" in its ability to map out meaning if it is trained on images as well. So I hope that misunderstanding is cleared.

Besides that, please elaborate on what is meant by the phrases below. You can add whatever thoughts and examples you feel are relevant, but I will also provide some questions to indicate what is generally confusing me.

Ashvin - you are fidgeting. There’s never been any misunderstanding here. I am completely fine with what you propose to be JP’s message. No problem extending the transcript a little: sure, he intends that meaning is today encoded only in language, but tomorrow it will be encoded also in images. The issue I raised, and continue to point to, remains entirely unchanged: it’s the idea that those text outputs today “encode meaning”. That’s the problem in JPs conception, as we know.

I will try to expand on the nature of language and meaning when I can, but it won’t be an easy post, and I am falling asleep in CET. In the meantime, I remind of this:

Our thinking voice and physical voice (our language) rarely convey our intuitive human potential. It is rather the expression of our dwelling in a sort of internally coherent, but parallel and disconnected layer of ideal existence, and can therefore be easily hacked. If we were to reconnect language with feeling and to reinfuse it with music and gesture, the LLMs would read and sound like childish caricatures of an authentically human voice, because we would be able to both express ourselves in a much more pregnant language, and to detect that character in our fellow humans.

Very true. Our compressing elemental nature in a sense is already something like a statistically weighed database, even though of a much different kind than the flat computational model. As such, it really is being activated by the most various 'winds', and semi-automatic verbal sequences are spat out. The scary thing is that our present educational system actively cultivates such elemental (stored) intelligence.

[Federica]

1/ "Meaning can go down from reality into language, but it cannot go back up from language into reality... There is no two-way connection between reality and its linguistic outpression. There’s a check valve in between"

What exactly is the differentiation being made here between "reality" and "language"? How is it that the outputs of our linguistic cognition cannot work back into the intuitive meaning we steer through with that linguistic cognition?

I wrote with high contrast, hoping it would help get across something. In a way, I tend to balance your preference to put everything on a smooth gradient, like an impressionist on a canvas. If you mean that language is also part of reality, of course this is the case, but here I don’t think it’s fruitful to retreat in this evidence, if it becomes a means to drift in the smoothness of things, where everything is ultimately on the same side of everything else. And I know this too is true in a certain sense, but as long as we are here writing these pages, I think we need fluid yet clearly operable concepts. Coming back to the question, I think it’s not ideal to speak of “linguistic cognition”. Although we are constantly merged with our linguistic habits, we can experience and conceive cognition as a pictorial act. Thinking doesn’t need semantics, it doesn’t need idioms to be flowing in a cognitive process. Sure, our experience of knowing on Earth is predominantly linguistic, but now we are trying to put things in focus. Saying “linguistic cognition” does the opposite, by patching together concepts and words as a point of departure. In this sense, the question, as you provide it, already leans towards its preferred answer.

This said, I think the simplest way to illustrate this distinction - with the teaching of spiritual science in the background - is to recall that, in thinking, we connect ourselves to something larger than our individuality. Through thinking we connect with the spirit in the things we think about, or rather that spirit - the concept of that object of thought - connects us to the percept. Just by being ourselves in the world, we cut the unity of being within ourselves, and thinking - through our mental pictures, not necessarily words - helps us repair that fracture within us. But, as we know, the full story of our life on Earth includes other layers of our being. In particular, we also have a soul, and we have feelings, through which we relate our experiences to ourselves in a unique way. With feelings, we color the concepts we receive with an individual touch, and that contributes to our sense of being a unique self in the world. I think language is the expression of that coloring, the individual quality with which we ensoul our cognitive, spiritual processes. Language comes from the soul (folk soul to individual soul) as our Earthly way to individualize the spirit with feeling. (Remember Helen Keller didn't feel like she was someone, before learning language). Perhaps we could say, Earthly idioms are manifested soul-fabric, because in language, the collective to individual feeling for the spirit is precipitated and recombined in sensory expression - auditory, visual. That sensory output can in turn be conceptualized, to give rise to semantics.

Now, in the same way as perception has become more and more abstractified in the latest centuries, leading to the disconnect of materialism, feeling has suffered a similar process. Hence, in today's linguistic experience, the true feeling that originally guided the sound formation through the larynx - the outer expression of feeling - has been practically lost, and we are left with a sort of materialism of feelings. Today we have the sensory perception of language, and the re-conceptualization of that perception - basically, the dictionaries and grammars. But we are not any longer really in contact with true feeling as formative force of the linguistic sensory layer. For this reason, I said that trains of language have sort of an inbuilt check-valve: we still use them, of course - like a materialist still experiences the activity of the same thinking within himself - however, we have become largely unconscious of the quality of feeling its music can encapsulate, laying as a potential in linguistic expression, and precipitated in the sounds. In other words, we are largely unable to make language our own, to feel through its nature. Language can’t serve us for the purpose of knowing our own soul, as it carries out ideal work. It doesn’t help us own our unique stance in the world. For that purpose, we are left relying on our physical body. We are mostly dreaming in mere auditory perceptions, and their re-conceptualizations.

Materialism of thinking blocks the mind from realizing the spirit in everything, and be its conscious vessel. Materialism of feeling blocks the heart from realizing through language the individual quality of our own soul, and our families’ and communities’, as key complement to pure cognition. Language use is therefore captive to its mere sensory, prosaic aspect, becoming a sort of inventory of sound combinations and word combinations, as horizontal proxies of trains of thought. We have been verbalizing thoughts for millennia, and we keep doing it, but once some words are pressed out, the linguistic sequence may go on, if not by itself, through habits of speech, through external or elemental influences, through lack of conscious resistance, like a sort of diffused soft-meme, in the worst cases. Poetry, for example, is a way to resist casualty of speech by shaping conscious paths for our feelings to continually flow. Poetry may break through those check valves, through the forces of conscious feeling. But today, I may say, we are captive to a feeling vantage point: we don’t fully experience feeling in language in first-person, we rather utilize symbols as per our catalogue instructions and then we let them roll under some hybrid steering. Steiner calls it the habit of "thinking in words" of contemporary man, or "thinking half thoughts", coming down to not thinking properly at all. That's why linguistic output can hardly work back into intuitive meaning: because the link of feeling, that would make for that continuous and fluid connection, has been cut, or seriously damaged, and other forces have taken hold of that flow. Words may arouse a recognition of an idea, a sort of second opinion. They lead us parallel to, or in the vicinity of an idea, and then may abruptly begin to gravitate around unknown attractors. As such, words and semantics turn out to be a disturbance to meaningful thinking, as much as they are a support to it.

There would be much more to say in other directions, and I haven't given concrete examples, but I started late and I’m already dozy. Does that make some sense nonetheless?