Something that the whole thing started reminding me of is that in Focusing/Internal Family Systems-type work, you can sometimes come across parts of the mind that feel like they involve a cluster of disparate memories united by a very specific emotional flavor.
For example, I once found a set of memories united by a theme of “feeling like I am an outsider or unable to connect with someone else, because there is something wrong with me”. This involved (among other things)
1) a time as a teenager when I told someone I had a crush on her and it came out pretty awkwardly, and we then stopped speaking after that (and I felt like an incompetenet/moral failure for having been that awkward)
2) times as a younger child when I didn’t want to go inside another kid’s home, because I went to a different school than everyone else in my neighborhood and that kid’s parents worked at the school where everyone else did, and I felt like an outsider who didn’t belong
3) a memory of being even younger and feeling like some of the older kids thought I was somehow defective because I was younger and more childish than them.
It’s also my impression that once a person carries this kind of a specific emotional energy (e.g. feeling like you are an outsider and disconnected from others because there is something wrong with you), then that emotional experience can project itself on a variety of later experiences and make you experience quite a few different things in that kind of light. (Felt senses also seem like they are closely related to this.) E.g. you might later be in a situation that would otherwise be neutral or even positive, but something triggers the emotional energy and causes it to color your experience of the situation, so you feel like a defective outsider who doesn’t belong.
It feels like there’s something very similar in the way that ′ petertodd’ seems to involve a specific kind of “flavor” that’s a little hard to exactly pin down, but which can then project its essential flavor on, and express itself through, potentially any type of content. This is very interesting, given that I suspect a huge chunk of human motivation involves these kinds of emotional flavors. Maybe it can tell us something about the kinds of self-organizing dynamics that create such clusters.
I previously have had no experience with IFS, Focusing or Felt sense, but it seems to absolutely click with my worldview and thoughts I’ve been having about the mind and the self for a long time. Still reading through several LW articles about it, but it gave me an idea. I have a creative project that I have a general ‘vibe’ for what I want it to be, but have no idea what I actually want out of it. So, aiming as much as possible to simply point as much at ‘the feeling’ or ‘felt sense’ it had in my mind, I wrote/dictated a few paragraphs of text about the work, much of which was literally just free association of words and vibes that got me closer to what I was feeling.
Then, I pasted it, verbatim, into GPT4. And I got one of the best prompt results I’ve ever gotten, it effortlessly translated my ramblings and vibes into a title, genre, and solid rundown of near-exactly what I had in mind, far better than I’ve had in the past when I’ve tried to just ask directly for creative advice. It didn’t ask me for specification, explain what I wanted. It just understood.
This is really interesting to me, especially given what you’ve said here about emotional flavors and what I know about how tokens operate in vector space by way of their relative meaning. If the human brain is a vector space of concepts, with certain neurons related to others based on their literal distance both semantically and physically (which I’m pretty sure it does, given what I’ve heard about different parts of the brain ‘lighting up’ on an mri when experiencing different things) then what is the difference, effectively, between our brains and this vector space of tokens that LLMs operate on?
Something that the whole thing started reminding me of is that in Focusing/Internal Family Systems-type work, you can sometimes come across parts of the mind that feel like they involve a cluster of disparate memories united by a very specific emotional flavor.
For example, I once found a set of memories united by a theme of “feeling like I am an outsider or unable to connect with someone else, because there is something wrong with me”. This involved (among other things)
1) a time as a teenager when I told someone I had a crush on her and it came out pretty awkwardly, and we then stopped speaking after that (and I felt like an incompetenet/moral failure for having been that awkward)
2) times as a younger child when I didn’t want to go inside another kid’s home, because I went to a different school than everyone else in my neighborhood and that kid’s parents worked at the school where everyone else did, and I felt like an outsider who didn’t belong
3) a memory of being even younger and feeling like some of the older kids thought I was somehow defective because I was younger and more childish than them.
It’s also my impression that once a person carries this kind of a specific emotional energy (e.g. feeling like you are an outsider and disconnected from others because there is something wrong with you), then that emotional experience can project itself on a variety of later experiences and make you experience quite a few different things in that kind of light. (Felt senses also seem like they are closely related to this.) E.g. you might later be in a situation that would otherwise be neutral or even positive, but something triggers the emotional energy and causes it to color your experience of the situation, so you feel like a defective outsider who doesn’t belong.
It feels like there’s something very similar in the way that ′ petertodd’ seems to involve a specific kind of “flavor” that’s a little hard to exactly pin down, but which can then project its essential flavor on, and express itself through, potentially any type of content. This is very interesting, given that I suspect a huge chunk of human motivation involves these kinds of emotional flavors. Maybe it can tell us something about the kinds of self-organizing dynamics that create such clusters.
I previously have had no experience with IFS, Focusing or Felt sense, but it seems to absolutely click with my worldview and thoughts I’ve been having about the mind and the self for a long time. Still reading through several LW articles about it, but it gave me an idea. I have a creative project that I have a general ‘vibe’ for what I want it to be, but have no idea what I actually want out of it. So, aiming as much as possible to simply point as much at ‘the feeling’ or ‘felt sense’ it had in my mind, I wrote/dictated a few paragraphs of text about the work, much of which was literally just free association of words and vibes that got me closer to what I was feeling.
Then, I pasted it, verbatim, into GPT4. And I got one of the best prompt results I’ve ever gotten, it effortlessly translated my ramblings and vibes into a title, genre, and solid rundown of near-exactly what I had in mind, far better than I’ve had in the past when I’ve tried to just ask directly for creative advice. It didn’t ask me for specification, explain what I wanted. It just understood.
This is really interesting to me, especially given what you’ve said here about emotional flavors and what I know about how tokens operate in vector space by way of their relative meaning. If the human brain is a vector space of concepts, with certain neurons related to others based on their literal distance both semantically and physically (which I’m pretty sure it does, given what I’ve heard about different parts of the brain ‘lighting up’ on an mri when experiencing different things) then what is the difference, effectively, between our brains and this vector space of tokens that LLMs operate on?
Would you be willing to share the prompt and result?