There isn’t really a me
When I write this, why do I write the word I am writing?
I do not know.
I can guess what I might write (or say, if I am talking) next. And after typing it out I would find it easy to pause and post-hoc rationalize why I wrote what I wrote.
But in the moment where the fingers have not yet started to move, in that illusive instant, I do not know what I am going to write.
I have been finding more and more similarities between my own thought processes and behavioural patterns of LLMs.
This is a disease common to each era. The mechanical frankenstein of the industrial age. The ghost in the shell of the age of compute. So I am just projecting onto the technology of my time.
But is it?
Truman Show sits in my list of movies that I want to watch but never will. Without having watched it, from what I have gleaned, it is about a person who finds himself to be a character in a TV show (the era disease strikes again!).
Today I felt like an LLM generating tokens [for a purpose I don’t know]. The moment passed.
For one thing, this rids me of my tendency to ask LLMs why they did what they did. Why they wrote what they wrote.
Because I feel it is all useless post hoc rationalization. Like me, they cannot step into the same attention stream twice.
The chain of thought that triggered this journal entry was a paper describing how long-range performance of agents can be scaled up by a process called forgetting.
The agent finds many ways and explores them. But at some point it just throws away all except the best approach so far and then repeats this process again.
I (and other humans) do that all the time too!
But the real reason (sic) I wrote this, instead of just letting that train of thought end, is a certain tendency I observe in me and have not really observed in the people I have met. (It is unclear to me whether that is just because I have interiority, or whether there really is a behavioural difference in me as an individual.)
I am fluid. Not in a mystical zen way, but I am like water. I can react to a situation in oh so many different ways, and the way I end up reacting is very contingent on random perturbations. I can be a friend, an onlooker, an enemy, or a disinterested mountain. I can be the deep sea, or the shallow stream. I can mirror you, or I can role-play “me”, picking a me from a closet.
But all of this is very contingent. There isn’t really a me.