LLMorphism: When humans come to see themselves as language models

None of these analogies are entirely wrong, they're just incomplete.

Humans are similar to machines for example in that our bodies convert energy to do work through a series of pumps and pipes and sensors and actuators. Life is not animated by some magic force but instead operates under the same physical laws that machines use to function.

a lot of control theory goes into steam train locomotive, you don't say it explicitly but the way people typically make the same reference they evoke the image of a simple steady state steam engine, and insinuate that people compared brains to whatever was the novelty. I don't think that was ever the case, and comparing the brain with the intricate feedback systems, regulators and more general control theory facets of an actual steam train locomotive is a lot more apt than people make it out to be as if people were comparing it to a simple steam engine proper (i.e. not a locomotive).

also if you look at lifeforms with and without brains, and lifeforms that do or don't do locomotion, there is a clear correlation between mammals, birds, reptiles, spiders, insects, ... which have brains and are motile, versus plants, fungi, ... which don't have brains and aren't significantly motile.

the moment you need to move (not just grow in this or that direction) you need a lot of things: muscle control, inverse kinematics, interpretation of the environment, speedy reactions, routing, planning, memory, ...

That's actually a really interesting thing to think about, learning how to "prompt" oneself.

The author lightly touches on other ways humans have viewed cognition, “computationalism” as one, but somewhat brushes these aside as though LLMs are somehow a unique expression of this tendency. That seems unlikely to me but we’re pretty early days into the tech to start assuming and concluding every initial hot take on “AI is Doing $Thing”.

Especially when this particular thing is just one in a very long line of metaphors humans make to our own minds’ operations every time a new major technology comes to play a pervasive role in society. Computers, steam engines, even aqueducts were not immune to comparisons of thought flowing like water, funneled by deliberate intent, etc. And for some, a certain amount of hand wringing worry or even moral panic about “what it’s doing to us”, eg taking away critical thinking because “OMG calculators!”

A more insidious related pathology- marital induced projected LLMorphism... where your wife constantly accuses you of having the personality of a large language model.