Comment by rdevilla

> Meaning is abstract. We can't express meaning: we can only signify it. An expression (sign) may contain the latent structure of meaning (the writer's intention), but that structure can only be felt through a relevant interpretation.

I'm reminded immediately of the Enochian language which purportedly had the remarkable property of having a direct, unambiguous, 1-to-1 correspondence with the things being signified. To utter, and hear, any expression in Enochian is to directly transfer the author's intent into the listener's mind, wholly intact and unmodified:

    Every Letter signifieth the member of the substance whereof it speaketh.
    Every word signifieth the quiddity of the substance.

    - John Dee, "A true & faithful relation of what passed for many yeers between Dr. John Dee ... and some spirits," 1659 [0].

The Tower of Babel is an allegory for the weak correspondence between human natural language and the things it attempts to signify (as opposed to the supposedly strong 1-to-1 correspondence of Enochian). The tongues are confused, people use the same words to signify different referents entirely, or cannot agree on which term should be used to signify a single concept, and the society collapses. This is similar to what Orwell wrote about, and we have already implemented Orwell's vision, sociopolitically, in the early 21st century, through the culture war (nobody can define "man" or "woman" any more, sometimes the word "man" is used to refer to a "woman," etc).

LLMs just accelerate this process of severing any connection whatsoever between signified and signifier. In some ways they are maximally Babelian, in that they maximize confusion by increasing the quantity of signifiers produced while minimizing the amount of time spent ensuring that the things we want signified are being accurately represented.

Speaking more broadly, I think there is much confusion in the spheres of both psychology and religion/spirituality/mysticism in their mutual inability to "come to terms" and agree upon which words should be used to refer to particular phenomenological experiences, or come to a mutual understanding of what those words even mean (try, for instance, to faithfully recreate, in your own mind, someone's written recollection of a psychedelic experience on erowid).

[0] https://archive.org/details/truefaithfulrela00deej/page/92/m...