[awongh]

> But your brain works the other way around. First there is a concept, a feeling, an image, and then the words come out to describe it.

After this I can't take the essay seriously- this sort of blanket statement about the one true hierarchy of consciousness and knowledge is BS.

While it seems to have been disproven that words in other languages cause people to speak and think differently, that also doesn't mean that words don't have any effect on the way we think, or that the concept of a word always has to come before the word itself.

The reason why we experience the uncanny valley of LLMs is because they don't represent a true consciousness, BUT it's also clear that the architecture represents certain qualities of consciousness- as the models have scaled we can see that it has some other non-word related understanding.

The evidence points to consciousness as a set of interlocking systems- attention, long term memory, short term memory, emotions, etc.