"The universe they operate in isn’t a world—it’s a superposition of countless incompatible snippets of text. It has no unified physics, no consistent ontology, no object permanence, no stable causal texture. It’s a fragmented, discontinuous series of words and tokens held together by probability and dataset curation rather than coherent laws."
I think some physicists and Buddhists would say this exactly describes the world humans inhabit. They might also agree that we live in such a world with the illusion that we have: "a unified narrative environment with real feedback: symbols that maintain identity over time, a stable substrate where “being someone” is definable, the ability to form and test a hypothesis, and experience the consequences".
The more I see LLM emergent behaviour simulate,unexpectedly, that of human cognition. I think it tells us much about human cognition as llm behaviour.