I believe you. But perhaps you can summarize ? Share a great passage ?
For me, a classic Baudrillardian example is the pumpkin spice latte, which contains no pumpkin.
A larger example, very relevant today, would be LLMs. In essence, they are machines for processing signs — signs detached from objects, and beginning to live a life of their own.
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Excellent. Thank you !
LLMs are like pulsing colonies of data-grown crystals. It’s amazing how much sign structure can be peeled off of human life with deep neural nets and oceans of training data.
Instead of discrete symbolic logic, it was quasi-continuous floating point numbers that managed it. That might tell us something.
Again, one could clarify that signs in LLMs live a life of their own and reflect not reality or real experience, but the language practices on which the model was trained. That is why, on certain questions, LLMs are definitely biased and give answers within the framework of the culture or political evaluation of countries embedded in the texts they were trained on.
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This is from Message again.
But in judging the significance of a piece of news, everything depends on the situation of the hearer. The question is not merely, What is the nature of the news? but, Who is the hearer? If a man has lost his way in a cave and hears the cry “Come! This way out!” the communication qualifies as news of high significance. But if another man has for reasons of his own come to the cave to spend the rest of his life, the announcement will be of no significance. To a man dying of thirst the news of diamonds over the next dune is of no significance. But the news of water is. The abstraction of the scientist from the affairs of life may be so great that he even ignores news of the highest relevance for his own predicament. When a friend approached Archimedes and announced, “Archimedes, the soldiers of Marcellus are coming to kill you,” Archimedes remained indifferent. He attributed no significance to a contingent piece of news in comparison with the significance of his geometrical deductions. In so doing it may be that he acted as an admirable martyr for science or it may be that he acted foolishly. All that we are concerned here to notice are the traits of objectivity.
I like this attention to the situatedness of the receiver. The point about thirst reminds me that the mirage “is” the water —but in this case we have “semblance.” Hallucinations might be understood this way. They “are” what they end up to only have “seemed” to be.
Yes. When they were first blowing up and I checked them out, I thought they were perfect examples of Heidegger’s Anyone. No responsibility, no singular risky perspective, but just a passing on of the gossip.
Much of this gossip is useful, because some “facts” aren’t controversial.
This is not about usefulness or reliability, but about the fact that the reality of signs can become strongly detached from the reality from which it separated.
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Yes. Oscillation itself is the aliveness. It isn’t a choice—it’s what being alive is. Forced.
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Gotcha ! Yes, that makes sense.
From one source:
A symbol can be anything, but Percy argues that a vocable (a word) is an ideal symbol. The vocable has to be empty, transparent, and thus lacking any biological relevance; it can’t be a sign to take some action. The symbol also has to be different/distinct from the object. If it is the same or similar to its referent, it would be an icon. A symbol must be physically unrelated to its the object; thus, it must be arbitrary. This gives the symbol agency in the mental (i.e. nonphysical) world. The symbol is simply valued for the meaning it carries. This allows it to take on the essence of the object, but, of course, in a different way.
Here’s another source here that I unfortunately cannot cut and paste from, because it’s a good summary.
Percy experimented with his terms. He was strongly influenced by Peirce.
We might say that a signal is something we understand causally. A symbol is instituted so that it can stand intersubjectively as the symbolized thing ( in its “life” or “transparent functioning” as opposed to its extrusion or thematization as symbol).
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If the warning cry is the eagle, why do you call it a warning sign?
That’s the Wittgenstein response. Meaning is use, not something underlying it. No one uses “warning sign” and “eagle” interchangeably.
Enactivist psychologists argue that emotion is the cradle within which cognition rests. It is perhaps even more central to meaning than cognition. Affect and emotion provides the relevance of a situation, why we care about it, why and how it matters to us. Without affect, the world is meaningless, without purpose or orientation. Affect is not simply information about the body, it is intentional, it is world-directed. It is the world which feels unabsorbing when we are bored, not the body. Think of the monkey’s call as a little piece of music. We might be inclined to consider music devoid of words as inarticulate meaning, although many musicians would push back and suggest it is verbal meaning which flattens and abstracts away from the immediacy of musical sense.
A sign is supposed to be repeatable. That’s what we tell ourselves, anyway. But is it really the same sign in different contexts? Is the meaning of the sign separable from its use?Is there such a thing as a sign apart from its use?
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It can be both, but not in the sense that one ‘underlies’ the other. A sign or word enters into the context of a meaning like ‘eagle’ as an enrichment of that context. For instance, font size , color and style enter into the sense of how a word is used.
When Wittgenstein says he sees the drawing ‘as’ a rabbit, drawing and rabbit belong to the same context of meaning. If instead I see the rabbit in a field, the context of the field belongs to that of my seeing the rabbit. Use is always contextually particular, with its particularity encompassing the circumstances of our engagement with something or someone.
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Can it? We say that letters of the alphabet are separable from all contexts in which they are incorporated into words. But that doesn’t mean they are separable from all contexts in general.
We certainty can’t reproduce identically the look of the letter ‘c’. But what about how it sounds? Isnt its pronunciation dependent on context? Even arguing that letters are intended to be context-free tools until incorporated into specific combinations with other letters or situations of use doesn’t prevent them from being understood always in the context of a particular use (c as the letter which comes before d or after b, c as the third letter in the alphabet, c as a consonant).
A sign is supposed to be repeatable. That’s what we tell ourselves, anyway. But is it really the same sign in different contexts? Is the meaning of the sign separable from its use? Is there such a thing as a sign apart from its use?
With the appearance of LLMs, we have effectively gained the possibility of experimental work with signs. A token for an LLM can be regarded as a sign, and the model stores the difference in a vector space of signs, while computational means engage in prediction relative to statistical usage. As a result, the model calculates, based only on a set of signs, possible and highly plausible texts. So one can say that a sign can live its own life, being detached from the object.
It is not really a sign in the full sense, but rather a symbolic element within a system of signs. Its content is not contained in the graphic shape itself; it is produced by its relations to other signs and by its possible uses.
The philosophical grounding behind technologies like llm’s already presuppose the kind of thinking that treats signs as split off from their uses. In other words, llm’s instantiate a certain set of prejudices concerning how language works. It’s like using the mechanism of a watch to explain how the universe works. LLM’s will eventually be replaced by architectures embodying a very different way of understanding language.
Yes, but we are now using exactly the same understanding of the sign. With a different understanding, it would no longer be a sign, but something else. After all, a sign is a purely abstract concept, not a physical object.
The understanding underlying the design of llm’s also dictates how we are to understand distinctions like those between abstract concept and physical object. And for me the question is whether there isnt a different, perhaps better way to understand the nature and origin of signs than that presupposed by the distinction between conceptual abstraction and physical object.
The term “sign” already refers to a certain understanding, theory, and tradition. That is why different terms exist: because there are different understandings. I mentioned signal and symbol. Other interpretations and definitions are probably possible as well, but in that case it would be more correct to use another name.
From the practice of use — in IT, for example — the graphic form and the sign itself are separated, and we have a great deal of practical experience with this. Are other definitions possible? Of course! For example, in Kabbalah — with which I am only superficially familiar — there is the concept of the broken vessels, in which meaning has spilled out, and the goal of the Kabbalist’s practice is to gather that meaning back together.