While the use of tarot archetypes is… questionable… it does point at an angle to exploring embedding space which is that it is a fundamentally semiotic space, its going in many respects to be structured by the texts that fed it, and human text is richly symbolic.
That said, theres a preexisting set of ideas around this that might be more productive, and that is structuralism, particularly the works of Levi Strauss, Roland Barthes, Lacan, and more distantly Foucault and Derrida.
Levi Strauss’s anthropology in particular is interesting ,because it looked at the mythologies of humans and tried to find structuring principles underlying it, particularly the “dialectics” , oppositions, and how these provided a sort of deep structure to mythology that was common across humanity (For instance Strauss noted “trickster” archetypes across cultures and proposed these formed a way of interrogating blurred oppositions, for instance sickness as a state that has has aspects of both life (dead things cant be sick) and death (a sick person is not rhetorically “full of life”).
Essentially what I’m getting at is that this sort of analysis likely works with any symbolic system that has had resonances with human thinking over time. The problem with Tarot is that it specifically applies to a certain european circumstance of meaning production. Astrology probably works just as well. Literary analysis however probably works dramatically better. Thus maybe it might be worth looking at the works of literature critics, particularly the structuralists where where very interested in ontologies of symbolic meaning, and this might provide a better toolkit than this.
@author—thank you for this fascinating exploration. I’m appreciating your intuition that there might be some interesting structures there and your ability to point to their shape through this research. It seems helpful to have some sense of the ways LLM may exhibit features/behaviours/geographies that we didn’t knowingly ‘put there’ and that are not easily noticeable.
@Shayne—Can you expand on ‘Literary analysis however probably works dramatically better. Thus maybe it might be worth looking at the works of literature critics’?
From what I’m understanding of what your comment is caring for, I don’t actually think that the approach you’re suggesting here gets you richer/more meaningful findings—structuralism provides its own extremely context-specific (both in time and culture) framing of the symbolic meaning landscape it’s concerned with. By comparison, the archetypes you find in the major arcana are pretty steeped in the cultural roots that have underpinned much of the you’re proposing to scrutinise instead, and is made up of figures that would have been more foundationally influential in the substrate of today’s Western culture (especially with its combination of cosmological influences). Therefore, it seems to me from the way you’ve phrased your comment that you would propose a shallower tool, essentially, which doesn’t strike me as more helpful in making sense of how an LLM might derive a blueprint of human cosmology.
Also, if the data that shaped the embedding space was all English language text, I think we’re lying to ourselves somewhat if we’re expecting a diverse, non-Western-centric cosmology to emerge from this kind of analysis. I agree with you that using Lévi-Strauss’ frameworks as another track could still be worthwhile, but heeding the previous sentence rather than thinking that the right lens can cure a lack that’s actually in the object we’re exploring.
Finally, can you clarify what you mean by your very first observation, please?
Ok. I must have missed this reply, my apologies for the late response.
There are elements of how embedding spaces that parallel the way studies of semiotics suggest human meaning production works. Similarities cluster, differences define clear boundaries of meaning and so on.
The reason I suggests literary theory, is because largely thats a widely documented field of study with academic standards, and its one that is more strongly aware of how meanings and associations map onto cultural cohorts (Ie tarot symbols would be meaningless to chinese folks, whereas i-ching might be more meaningful to those chinese folks) However literary theory is more interested in the structures of those meanings with ideas whos fundamental units are things like Metaphors, Metonyms, Opposition, Categories and so on.
While the use of tarot archetypes is… questionable… it does point at an angle to exploring embedding space which is that it is a fundamentally semiotic space, its going in many respects to be structured by the texts that fed it, and human text is richly symbolic.
That said, theres a preexisting set of ideas around this that might be more productive, and that is structuralism, particularly the works of Levi Strauss, Roland Barthes, Lacan, and more distantly Foucault and Derrida.
Levi Strauss’s anthropology in particular is interesting ,because it looked at the mythologies of humans and tried to find structuring principles underlying it, particularly the “dialectics” , oppositions, and how these provided a sort of deep structure to mythology that was common across humanity (For instance Strauss noted “trickster” archetypes across cultures and proposed these formed a way of interrogating blurred oppositions, for instance sickness as a state that has has aspects of both life (dead things cant be sick) and death (a sick person is not rhetorically “full of life”).
Essentially what I’m getting at is that this sort of analysis likely works with any symbolic system that has had resonances with human thinking over time. The problem with Tarot is that it specifically applies to a certain european circumstance of meaning production. Astrology probably works just as well. Literary analysis however probably works dramatically better. Thus maybe it might be worth looking at the works of literature critics, particularly the structuralists where where very interested in ontologies of symbolic meaning, and this might provide a better toolkit than this.
@author—thank you for this fascinating exploration. I’m appreciating your intuition that there might be some interesting structures there and your ability to point to their shape through this research. It seems helpful to have some sense of the ways LLM may exhibit features/behaviours/geographies that we didn’t knowingly ‘put there’ and that are not easily noticeable.
@Shayne—Can you expand on ‘Literary analysis however probably works dramatically better. Thus maybe it might be worth looking at the works of literature critics’?
From what I’m understanding of what your comment is caring for, I don’t actually think that the approach you’re suggesting here gets you richer/more meaningful findings—structuralism provides its own extremely context-specific (both in time and culture) framing of the symbolic meaning landscape it’s concerned with. By comparison, the archetypes you find in the major arcana are pretty steeped in the cultural roots that have underpinned much of the you’re proposing to scrutinise instead, and is made up of figures that would have been more foundationally influential in the substrate of today’s Western culture (especially with its combination of cosmological influences). Therefore, it seems to me from the way you’ve phrased your comment that you would propose a shallower tool, essentially, which doesn’t strike me as more helpful in making sense of how an LLM might derive a blueprint of human cosmology.
Also, if the data that shaped the embedding space was all English language text, I think we’re lying to ourselves somewhat if we’re expecting a diverse, non-Western-centric cosmology to emerge from this kind of analysis. I agree with you that using Lévi-Strauss’ frameworks as another track could still be worthwhile, but heeding the previous sentence rather than thinking that the right lens can cure a lack that’s actually in the object we’re exploring.
Finally, can you clarify what you mean by your very first observation, please?
Ok. I must have missed this reply, my apologies for the late response.
There are elements of how embedding spaces that parallel the way studies of semiotics suggest human meaning production works. Similarities cluster, differences define clear boundaries of meaning and so on.
The reason I suggests literary theory, is because largely thats a widely documented field of study with academic standards, and its one that is more strongly aware of how meanings and associations map onto cultural cohorts (Ie tarot symbols would be meaningless to chinese folks, whereas i-ching might be more meaningful to those chinese folks) However literary theory is more interested in the structures of those meanings with ideas whos fundamental units are things like Metaphors, Metonyms, Opposition, Categories and so on.