> Yes, we cannot learn anything about reality from language alone. This is 'the intentional illusion' or you could call it 'the aboutness illusion'. I just don

> Yes, we cannot learn anything about reality from language alone. This is 'the intentional illusion' or you could call it 'the aboutness illusion'. I just don't think this is correct. Language is embedded in reality, is a product of reality, and is correlated with reality. > As in you think you are learning a speed limit for a road by looking at a sign with a speed limit on it. But the sign itself is just some shapes, and no aspect of its structure has anything to do with speed, roads, or speed limits. Again, simply wrong. 5km/h limit, 60km/h limit, 120km/h limit - even the physical width of the text has a correlation to the exponent of the speed limit! Which will correlate to the curvature of the road! These are not arbitrary, they're tightly interlinked on every level except the specific shape of the glyphs themselves. That's why your argument only holds up for the most basic features such as glyph frequency. As you zoom out, structural similarities begin to appear; not in the shape of the text but in the shape of features abstracted from the text. That's why LLMs attain novel capabilities as you increase depth and context size, as they can begin to condition on the deeper structures of reality that leak through the language. As language is abstracted from reality, at sufficient scale, a cognition based on language begins to necessarily model reality itself. > You first act within the world by building a rich conceptual understanding, you then associate arbitrary conventions with this understanding, and then can make inferences about this world by reconstructing a novel conceptual understanding given by these signs. Completely unclear if this is true at any rate. Humans don't first learn to interact with the world and then learn language; language and world-understanding co-develop.