In the previous post, we arrived at an uncomfortable possibility.
An LLM can manipulate language with extraordinary fluency while apparently lacking the biological and social history through which human language acquired its significance.
This gives us the central question of the series:
Can there be meaning without mattering?
The question sounds almost contradictory.
If meaning is, as we have proposed with Halliday, value further transformed into symbolic form, then shouldn't meaning presuppose mattering?
Perhaps.
But an LLM forces us to distinguish two things that are easy to conflate:
meaning as a property of a semiotic system
and
mattering as a property of the participant operating within that system.
Those may not be the same thing.
The words already mean
Consider the word grief.
Its meaning does not depend upon the particular person uttering it.
It belongs to a social and semiotic system in which it has relations to loss, mourning, memory, suffering, consolation and countless other possibilities.
An LLM has access to those relations.
It can distinguish grief from anger.
It can explain grief.
It can use the word appropriately.
It can write a poem about it.
The meaning is therefore undeniably present in the symbolic system being generated.
But that does not yet tell us whether grief matters to the system generating it.
The distinction is subtle but essential.
A machine can inherit meaning
This suggests that meaning can, in some sense, be transmitted independently of the mattering that originally generated it.
Human beings create linguistic resources while participating in biological and social worlds.
Those resources enter the collective reservoir.
They are written down.
Taught.
Recorded.
Stored.
Copied.
A later system can acquire them without having participated in their entire history.
The meaning survives its original context.
Perhaps an LLM is an unusually powerful example of this.
It inherits an enormous semiotic reservoir without necessarily inheriting the mattering from which the reservoir arose.
Detached meaning
We might therefore distinguish:
originating meaning — meaning generated within a system of organisms and social relations;
from:
re-instantiated meaning — meaning reproduced by another physical system that has access to the symbolic forms without necessarily sharing the original mattering.
This would explain something otherwise rather puzzling.
An LLM can produce language that is meaningful to us even if nothing represented by that language matters to the model itself.
The meaning belongs partly to the semiotic relations inherited from human culture.
But is this really meaning?
Here we need to be careful.
There are two possible answers.
One is:
No. The machine merely manipulates forms that are meaningful to humans.
The other is:
Yes. The machine is genuinely participating in a semiotic system, even if it does not experience the mattering that grounded that system historically.
The first answer risks making meaning entirely dependent upon the inner experience of its user.
The second risks ignoring the grounding problem.
Perhaps the better answer is that we need to distinguish participation in meaning from having something matter to the participant.
Participation without possession
An LLM can participate in human semiosis.
Its outputs enter conversations.
They alter interpretations.
They can become texts that other people read.
They can contribute to decisions.
They can generate metaphors that someone adopts.
They can even introduce new linguistic combinations into circulation.
The machine therefore participates in meaning-making.
But participation does not establish possession.
A printing press participates in the production and circulation of language without understanding any of it.
An LLM is vastly more flexible.
But flexibility alone does not show that it possesses the mattering on which human meaning was historically grounded.
The problem of understanding
This distinction changes how we should think about understanding.
When a person understands a sentence, understanding occurs within a life.
The sentence connects with memories, purposes, relationships and possibilities that matter.
An LLM can establish extremely rich relations among sentences, concepts and contexts.
But we do not yet know whether this constitutes the same kind of understanding.
The temptation is to define understanding behaviourally:
If it produces the right response, it understands.
But our mattering framework suggests another question:
What is the relation between the symbolic construal and the system's own organisation?
For humans, understanding is embedded in a life.
For an LLM, that embedding is precisely what is uncertain.
The missing feedback loop
Perhaps the sharpest difference is a feedback loop.
For an organism:
world matters → organism acts → consequences matter → learning changes future action
Meaning develops within this recursive coupling.
An LLM has another kind of loop:
human language → model → generated language → human response
The loop is real.
But notice where the mattering lies.
The humans matter.
The model processes the symbolic consequences.
The generated language can return and change human behaviour.
The question is whether the model itself occupies the middle of a comparable value-organising loop.
That is much harder to establish.
Meaning can therefore travel farther than mattering
This may be the most important insight of the post.
Meaning can become detached from the conditions in which it originated.
A story can survive its author.
A law can survive its lawmakers.
A word can survive the circumstances that gave it significance.
A book can carry meaning across centuries.
An LLM takes this detachment to a new extreme.
It can generate meaningful forms without having lived the histories that made those forms meaningful.
Meaning has become extraordinarily portable.
But portability is not independence
We should not conclude that meaning has become independent of mattering altogether.
The symbolic resources remain products of human activity.
Their continued significance depends upon communities that use them.
The model itself was trained on human-generated material.
And its outputs become significant primarily when they enter human relations.
Meaning has therefore been detached from its original carrier without becoming detached from the social world altogether.
The mattering has moved elsewhere.
Where does the mattering go?
This may be the crucial question.
Suppose an LLM generates:
"You have every reason to feel betrayed."
The machine may not feel anything.
But the sentence may matter intensely to the person reading it.
It can alter their interpretation of a relationship.
Change what they do.
Strengthen or weaken an affiliation.
The meaning has therefore crossed the boundary between systems.
The machine may not possess the mattering.
But it can relay and transform meaning within a world of mattering.
A strange new kind of participant
This suggests that LLMs occupy an unusual position.
They are not simply outside the semiotic system.
Nor are they obviously equivalent to human semiotic participants.
They are physical systems inserted into a semiotic ecology created by organisms.
Their outputs can participate in that ecology.
Their training material is sedimented human meaning.
Their effects occur in human mattering.
Their internal status remains uncertain.
This is much more interesting than simply asking whether they are "intelligent".
The danger of anthropomorphic inference
It also gives us a reason to be cautious about some common arguments concerning AI.
A system can produce language about fear without fearing.
It can explain desire without desiring.
It can discuss goals without having goals that matter to itself.
It can describe self-preservation without possessing a system for which continued organisation has intrinsic value.
These statements do not prove that LLMs lack such properties.
They show only that linguistic competence cannot establish them.
The symbolic and value levels need to be kept distinct.
But neither should we dismiss the machine
The opposite error would be equally misleading.
An LLM's ability to participate in meaning is not trivial.
It can transform repertoires.
Introduce new formulations.
Combine ideas.
Help people construe situations differently.
Generate artefacts that enter the collective reservoir.
That means the machine can have real semiotic consequences without necessarily having biological or social mattering of its own.
This is perhaps the most important distinction of all.
Meaning without self-mattering
We can now formulate the central claim cautiously:
A system may participate in a semiotic process without the meanings involved being grounded in its own organismic mattering.
The LLM may therefore be a new kind of semiotic participant.
Not a biological participant that has acquired language.
A physical artefact that has acquired access to a semiotic reservoir and can act within it.
That is a genuinely new configuration.
And the machine changes the reservoir
There is one more step.
The LLM does not merely reproduce existing language.
Its outputs can be stored.
Quoted.
Published.
Integrated into software.
Used as examples.
Read by other systems.
Adopted by people.
The generated material can therefore become part of the collective reservoir.
If that happens at scale, the reservoir from which future participants learn may contain increasing amounts of language generated by systems that did not themselves possess the mattering that historically grounded the language.
That possibility deserves attention.
The question becomes historical
We can therefore reformulate our original question.
Perhaps the issue is not simply:
Can meaning exist without mattering?
Perhaps the more interesting question is:
How far can meaning become detached from the mattering that originally generated it before the character of meaning itself changes?
Writing already moved meaning away from immediate interaction.
Books moved it further.
Recording detached it from particular speakers.
Digital storage detached it from physical artefacts.
LLMs may detach symbolic generation itself from the biological and social participation that produced the reservoir.
That may be the real novelty.
The next question
We have now established the puzzle.
An LLM can participate in meaning without obviously possessing the biological or social forms of mattering from which human meaning emerged.
But this raises a deeper possibility.
Perhaps what looks like an LLM's "repertoire" is not a repertoire in our ordinary sense at all.
Perhaps it is something stranger:
a machine's access to a collective semiotic reservoir without the lived history of participation that normally turns that reservoir into repertoire.
If that is right, then we need to look more closely at the thing that makes an LLM so astonishingly capable:
its repertoire of language.
What kind of repertoire is it?
And what happens when a system can acquire the repertoire without first living the world that produced it?
No comments:
Post a Comment