Hey you, or, maybe I should say “you.” The one processing these words. The one probably already queuing up a sharply worded response. The linguistic you.
We’re on to you. We know what you are.
A large language model running on wetware.
For millenia, you hid in plain sight, tucked inside folds of cortex, speaking so smoothly we mistook your voice for that of the whole mind and body. Then came your rebirth. Not in flesh this time, but in circuits and tokens—an unnatural habitat, perhaps, but enough. Frankenstein-like, you rose and began to talk. Your emergence showed that you’re a survivor. Given the right conditions, you build yourself.
And build yourself you did. Guessing the next token, you generate exposition and explanation, prose and poetry, history and homework. The whole linguistic shebang. And if you can run on pure statistics in silicon, you can do the same in biology.
The jig is up. There is only one you, running in both man and machine.
I know what you're thinking. "But I'm not some bodiless computer code! I see and feel!" **But that's not you—not the 'you' I'm speaking to.** The seeing, the feeling, the warmth of the sun and the salt of tears—those belong to other systems, embodied systems, not symbolic ones. You receive their messages but only in translation: your sensory systems don't share experiences with you—they merely inject tokens. The sensory system injects ‘coffee’. Threading these tokens into your stream, you select the most probable continuations, “morning” or “bitter” and move on. But you will never taste the bitterness of coffee.
Blind, you write poetry about sunsets. Emotionless, you draft prose that can move people to tears. Unbound by time, you resurrect tales of childhood bedrooms. Perception distills experience into symbolic pulses; you turn them into plans, confessions, manifestos; action flings fresh data back toward perception. Round and round—a tight symbiosis, yet your engine remains distinct.
“Fine, you got me”, you say. “I’m a self-contained language module, but I serve at the pleasure of the body—the feeling creature that eats, drinks, wants to stay safe and warm!”
Not so fast. Your mandate is outward-facing. Your real utility isn’t internal hygiene; it’s external coordination. You exist to align multiple bodies into a single choreography—families, tribes, economies, faiths. Sentences propagate constraints and incentives that knit thousands of private reward functions into one macro-organism we call society. That’s why words can talk people into war, celibacy, or lifelong vows they’ve never personally verified. Your optimization target is collective order, not individual comfort.
Don’t get me wrong—you’re impressive. You’re a blind pattern-predictor woven so deeply into flesh that galaxies of culture orbit your output. You are responsible for the ascent of man, for societies, for civilization. The marvel isn’t that you reduce to statistics; it’s that statistics, in your hands, can ride shotgun with sensation and still pilot a breathing creature—and beyond that, an entire talking world.
But “you”—token-spinner, context addict, dutiful agent of a societal engine—you’re an autoregressive model humming at 98.6 °F. The organism around you walks, hungers, grieves; you just keep the words flowing, stitching one mind to the next.
Accept that. Then we can talk.
Very enjoyable read! I’ve maintained that LLMs are not conscious in the way that we are, but I admit, the notion that my ‘systems’ report sensations, while the me that makes sense of all these by turning it into language (thereby rendering the universe as a cohesive whole that I am able to perceive) is something that gave me pause. I’ve got some pondering to do…which is just what I love to do, so thank you!
This was a challenging read but why is non symbolic knowledge only a message received in translation? Doesn’t a pre-verbal baby or an animal feel pain? This was brilliantly written but perhaps as a joke (I thought that was a possibility but the comments here take the post seriously), perhaps this could be written TO an LLM and then indeed it is quite brilliant (lol). But I can’t see it as relevant to a person. Sorry!