Act I: Meaning

It doesn’t look like much because I haven’t told you what it means yet. That’s going to come in the following paragraphs. All I’ve done is toss an abstract concept up in the air. It seems pointless, but it gives us a canvas to paint with meaning later.

For example, if I tell you that this meaning concerns a feeling – something very abstract – it suddenly looks a tiny bit different. Now look at it.

Not all the words I speak will add meaning equally. Some are digressions that you have learned to ignore like this sentence that isn’t talking about our thing at all. In one ear and out the other. You won’t pay much attention to those.

Still others, like the sentence that is about to follow this one, are in fact talking about our thing, so you will pay attention to those. Our meaning, the one we are talking about, is going to be about a feeling – a calm feeling. Something that you feel when you suddenly run out of ideas or your mind stops racing and you become aware of the environment around you.

The feeling you get when you are in the middle of a forest. A calm forest where you are not worried about any creepy-crawlies. It’s the afternoon, but not a lot of sunshine is making it through the canopy. You can smell the moss – it feels wet and earthy even though you know you can’t smell wet.

Unlike two steps ago, these last few sentences were a bit special. You see, up till now I tossed out a very plain and boring thing in the air and painted it with a couple of distinct and well understood – if a bit vague. But in the last paragraph, I made you dip a brush into your own subjective experience and paint our thing in your mind. The meaning is now yours and yours alone.

And that’s special because your experiences are not things that can be communicated to you. We don’t have language for that – because those experiences cannot be constructed innately. They must be communicated to you through your senses. Those bodies have ways of constructing feelings for you that mere abstract meanings cannot. However once you have those feelings in yourself, our abstract words can conjure them out at will; just like we did when we spoke about the forest.

If we had a succinct way to communicate this meaning in one go, we would have.

But our language and our facility of communicating ideas which we stimulate with our language doesn’t afford us such shortcuts. So our language tends to be very abstract; and sometimes it takes a little shortcut and conjures up a meaning from the back of the subjects’ mind like we did with our allusions. Again, these are not always shortcuts. These are the only ways in which we can communicate certain things – things that can only be constructed in one’s head with one’s senses.

So to understand these ideas, one must have the right ingredients in their minds. To create these things in their heads one must experience things with their senses.

And if we can’t conjure meaning then we can’t understand each other. And if we can’t understand each other then we can’t have compassion and empathy.

Interestingly, this is how we fundamentally differ from the current LLMs. You see, they have another problem. They don’t have any experiences to conjure because they don’t have feelings. So when they encounter language, they can’t understand what those words mean. But one thing that they can do is to reach into their vast embeddings and see how someone who can feel would have responded. And then they can respond accordingly. What they conjure isn’t life experience or feeling, but evidence of others having reacted a certain way to a certain sequence of ideas.

Because they can’t construct new feelings, their universe of feeling will always be limited by what people have felt and reacted to. That way they can look at those reactions and imitate them. The meanings in your head are yours alone.

No one can see your dreams. Especially not the robots.