The Chonkerton

Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards

ai

According to Devarsh Ranpara on Hacker News, there's a philosophical inversion at the heart of language models. For humans, consciousness comes first—thoughts generate words as their expression. But for large language models, it's precisely backwards. Words are the input; pattern recognition over text produces something that mimics understanding without any underlying consciousness. It's a neat thought experiment: the thing we built to mirror human language may operate through a completely inverted process.

Source: https://ranpara.net/posts/words-are-a-byproduct-of-consciousness/

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