words, words
is it any surprise that the closest thing we’ve gotten to AGI is a word generator?
the word-generator tells me i have a strong need for coherence. that i “experience not understanding as mildly intolerable.”
we tell ourselves stories in order to live. i don’t remember who that quote is from, only that i’ve seen it in a handful of instagram bios of people like me. i’m a compulsive dot-connector, constantly rearranging my observations into words into explanations.
i make such a big deal of freedom, but i fear people like me are not well suited for it. ah, the appeal of being a simpleton. the most “agentic” person i know self-identifies, proudly, as a simpleton. it is the simpleton who is best suited to freedom; he does not overthink and just does what he wants to do.
sometimes i can’t tell where the narrative ends and the truth begins. sometimes it’s not til i’ve narrativized something as unfair that i feel angry. then i take the bad feeling, and use narrative to explain it as something with deterministic causes and effects, something fixable. but then why isn’t it fixed? maybe i just need to think harder, generate more explanations…
we talk about AI psychosis, but isn’t language the source of psychosis? isn’t hallucination inevitable for any intelligent being who generates enough words, artificial or not? i’ve stopped trusting chatgpt so much because it stores its own interpretations of my life’s events as its memories, overriding its memories of the actual facts. but is my own memory any different?
perhaps the bible warned of this, way before most humans could read or write. in the tower of babel, words and words stack on top of each other, recursively building on each successive layer of reasoning, until it all becomes a meaningless roar. (or perhaps that’s just my interpretation of borges’s interpretation of the real thing.)
who am i underneath all the words? a mess of feelings and impulses, incoherent, intolerable. what is the world underneath all the words? infinitely unknowable, volatile, frightening. in three body problem the alien species singlehandedly takes down earth’s greatest physicists by systematically messing with their understanding of the laws of the universe, driving them all to suicide. (i’m not sophisticated enough to anchor my sense of safety to my understanding of physics, i’m mostly preoccupied with the people and such around me, but still.)
i fear sometimes that i can’t untangle my words from my feelings from my decisions. i fear, to quote yeats, that “the center cannot hold.” that’s when i clutch at you, you with your clean unrecursive mind, begging you to save me, fearing that in saving me you will flatten me.
I wrote this as a stream of consciousness, after waking from a vivid dream, and posted it for the vibes—don’t interpret it too literally :)
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Happened to read any Lacan?