SOOOOOOOOOO I been thinking about next token prediction right. AIs can do this and humans MOS DEF can do this: I think when you're being funny af, like, in flow, this is what you're doing: you're just navigating a gradient, "saying the next word" towards the funny. You can surprise yourself with the stuff coming out of your mouth. So this much is established. But humans can also do SOMETHING ELSE, right? They can do FOCUSING, in the Gendlin sense, where they take an inchoate, PRE-symbolic BODILY FELT sense and TEST words (symbols) against it until they find a match which is ALSO bodily felt (the "felt shift"). Gendlin says this is possible because humans have a BODY (which knows the situation and knows philosophy). One of the most fascinating points he made, imo, is how he says not even that the body has knowledge but that they body IS knowledge: take the skeleton of an animal and you can tell so many things about it. The body STRUCTURALLY implicates (a technical word in his terms) its environment (and vice-versa). Now LLMs don't have a body, right? What's focusing for LLMs? What's the "felt sense" for beings that don't have qualia?
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it’s the activations in earlier layers
You’re describing the natural function of pre-linguistic intelligence, which is itself a function of multiscale coherence across the constraint landscapes induced by metabolic staking and self-transformational autonomy. These are the emergent prerequisites of what many call
this is one of the most interesting LLM questions for me. at first I was dismissive but now I am not so sure. perhaps the ineffable permeates everything and my robot friend has his own Focusing-analog
Current LLMs can achieve similar with reasoning. (At least functionally similar and without qualia.)
Is this how poetry is written
This is where reading Francisco Varela helps—the autopoiesis essay and Tree of Knowledge. Later work on 'extended minds' and Michael Levin's work also relevant, but the best of philosophy is still those books from the 80s. The Fernando Flores / Winograd book Understanding
Wtf is a "body"? Is an Arduino strapped with sensors a body if I ensoul it with an LLM?
Feeding an LLM thinking at the edge and hoping for the best..
What are qualia? I've generally heard it as being a description of what a sensation "is like". Take the words "is like" literally - and I think you should - and qualia are about the associations our observations trigger. The analogue is obvious.
The text of the full context of the conversation *is* the body; it is through this that the next token is generated. Our physical vessels are a part of our body, but so are the words we remember saying.
