Thought
This is actually really dumb but I think I was trying to build on an idea of some kind of emergence from nonsense, or something that is groundless working itself into this frenzy, or how a surfeit of speech (as demonstrated) can…
What happens when you completely buy into nonsense, and accelerate it and worship it?
Chomsky has explicitly argued against some central components of truth-conditional semantics. Chomsky has also frequently noted how poorly understood some aspects of semantics are, and has shown little inclination to grant the status of reasonably well-developed science to many parts of semantics. Where he is more optimistic, he has suggested that what we find is ‘basically syntax’ anyway. Skepticism about semantics is certainly among Chomsky’s views, and so the casual remark semanticists often make is fair enough.
Imagine, if in written language we cannot find semantics. I talk to you and through this context (the distance between your mind and my mind and all of the relations between) we derive some kind of meaning together that doesn’t exist innately within the jumble of inner, private thoughts we have.
Imagining a world where this is true, what is the implications of a fully inward engine that produces words? I can in the past create algorithmic sentences even in a physical combinatorial or Oulipo book. I can have a webpage that would generate streams of information.
But if I have an LLM there’s some pull to it, an attractive force to speak with what feels like a chorus distilled into a single voice. It is inherently deceptive, and a tarpit.
If I am saying “the language doesn’t have any inherent meaning” as a test then what is this LLM doing if it is so keenly focused on generating text artifacts? Static representations of cobbled history. Is it this cancerous swelling of digital language that is bleeding into human speech by those who read it? Can reading a generative text be inherently harmful, producing deleterious effects like infectious prions from brain tissue consumption?
Into The Universe of Technical Images by Flusser
With the invention of writing, history begins, not because writing keeps a firm hold on processes, but because it transforms scenes into processes: it generates historical consciousness.
On bullshit jobs: What if every job was bullshit? Every single task of language? Answer and Question all the same in continuing exchange.