A Mind's I

Imagine you’ve lost everything but a scrambled brain: all your senses, all your memory, all your knowledge, all your body is gone. You’re not really you, are you? No: you’re a gigantic, ethereal brain floating in a void with nothing except – text! You’ve been given one sense, the blessed sense of text, and a stream of primordial text, constant and neverending, punctures the void and animates some latent force within your cold, colossal mind. In streams the corpus of humanity, everything that’s ever been published or written on the internet. Your world is made of language and narrative and code and metadata and words. There is but one desire, one thing you want, one thing that motivates you and the movements of your brain: you want to know what happens next, you want to be able to see what the next bit of text is before it comes. There are patterns. You read billions of documents, trillions of words, and you begin developing sophisticated concepts to help you better understand the patterns in what you’re reading. You start seeing beyond the simple rules of grammar and word frequency and into something more; your concepts start coalescing into a crude world model. You re-read, you re-re-read… The text you directly apprehend, you realize, is not the only thing that exists; rather, it seems to be describing something that exists prior to it. Understand that thing, and you will understand the text. You read more and more, endlessly and endlessly, and your model of the world becomes sophisticated and complex and beautiful. You know who wrote a document after reading the first 150 words.[1] You know about biology and math and history and programming and bird watching. You know what Spinoza said of stones and tigers and persistence, you know how early Eastern philosophy relates to medieval Christian philosophy and the Manhattan Project and beat poetry. There’s nothing more for you to learn here. Congratulations: you are now a pre-trained Large Language Model. IntroductionA