Yes the title is a palindrome, letting the comma go where it needs to, but that’s not the topic here. Rather I’m hearkening back to my senior thesis at Princeton, on Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, wherein I posited a thought experiment.
The thought experiment: I wanted my reader to posit a single Adam, like an LLM (not a term in 1979), that spoke through everybody. Think of language like that, and you’ll maybe DuckRabbit into the Wittgensteinian view, of a vast machinery without interiority, which isn’t to say we don’t have private lives, only that “we” belongs to it, as part of its machinery. See?
I also talked about chunks of text (mega-tokens) getting organized like railroad cars in a switching yard to make sense. Trains of thought. When you read enough, you start to find a lot of the same trains (of thought) in peoples’ writing, which again lends itself to the “One LLM Behind It All” thought experiment.
Nothing changes, actually, when you look at it this way, except one’s “sensibilities” perhaps one could put it. The temptation to lunge at internal ephemera in order to capture “the meaning of” by means of introspection, is lessened, as Wittgenstein suggested would be the case. He’s operating in an aesthetic dimension, not sharing empirical findings from anthropology, except “investigations” do require attention to details, the actual patterns.
Once you give up the easy picture of meaning, representation, name pointing to object, then what do you replace it with? A more detective like attitude. Discovering meanings takes research, field study. Wittgenstein used the field of mathematics for a lot of his “entomological” studies (or call it “ant work”). Namespaces do tend to colonize one another, which is to say blend, to varying effect.
Turning to one of those “psychological” verbs, is “sulking” a sensation? Does one close one’s eyes and savor that sulking feeling? Is it the same for everyone?
Or is it a mistake to identify such a complex storyteller verb with some physiologically enmeshed endocrine talk?
I make fun of the overly literal interpretation of “interiority” in this spoofy prompt to Perplexity:
Help me with a satirical piece poking fun at neurobiologists who over-literalize English verbs to where they imagine chemical processes corresponding to every novelist’s invention, such as “sulking”. These scientists have suddenly discovered the “sulking hormone” and know which part of the brain is involved. Parody prose.And here’s what Perplexity came back with, some very apropos trains of thought, wending their way through Hilbert Space:
Clever premise — the satire practically writes itself once you imagine a research team describing “sulking” with the seriousness of a Nature Neuroscience paper. Here’s a short parody take you could expand or stylize further:
________________________________
The Sulk Cortex and Its Endocrine Pathways
After decades of neglect, neurobiology has finally caught up with the novelists. In a paper preprinted last week, researchers at the Institute for Limbic Literalism announced discovery of the long-theorized sulking hormone, endosulkine. “It’s what happens,” explained lead author Dr. Primrose Gland, “when an organism receives insufficient validation but refuses both confrontation and forgiveness.”
The team identified a walnut-sized region of the brain near the anterior insula, now dubbed the Sulk Cortex, whose metabolic activity spikes when subjects are asked to “feel misunderstood but also a bit superior.” Functional imaging revealed synchronized pouting waves across hemispheres, particularly when observing others being comforted first.
Administration of synthetic endosulkine to lab mice produced telltale behavioral changes: hunched posture, slow tail swishes, and refusal to run the maze even after being told it “wasn’t their fault.” In humans, microdoses led participants to stare at unwashed dishes while whispering “whatever.”
“We now suspect that sulking may serve an adaptive purpose,” said Dr. Gland. “It allows the brain to conserve energy previously wasted on rational communication.” The team is already investigating adjacent regions potentially responsible for brooding, moping, and the dignified flounce. Funding applications are pending, though reviewers have complained of long delays and pointed silences.
