Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards • Hacker News Board

Re: Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards

#61

Post by smallerfish » Tue, Jun 30, 2026, 2:55 PM UTC

> When you speak, what comes first, the idea or the word? Do you first feel a thought inside you, and only after that go searching for the right word to wrap around it? I think we all do. The word is never the start. The word is just the skin. The idea, the consciousness, is the thing sitting under it.

In (at least once school of) Tibetan Buddhist meditation you observe the part of the mind that is producing ideas, and then suppress it in order to explore deeper layers of consciousness. The "lights on" "you" that is observing is _not_ the idea producing part of the mind, which to me at least seems to be more mechanical.

I do agree with the author of course that a concept isn't necessarily wrapped with language from the start, and can be a skin; but equally it is possible to think in a verbal mode.

Re: Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards

#62

Post by sigbottle » Tue, Jun 30, 2026, 2:56 PM UTC

etrautmann wrote: post #15

michael1999 wrote: post #10

It is not all obvious that consciousness precedes language. Hellen Keller provides a vivid description of her pre-verbal mental state as something less than reflective conscious. > Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was a no-world. I cannot hope to describe adequately that unconscious, yet conscious time of nothingness. I did not know that I knew aught, or that I lived or…

I think this is different if you have vision though. I struggle to understand how someone can look at intelligent animals that don’t have language and not intuitively assume that they’re conscious. Yes this is a tricky problem without an answer but IMO the elements of consciousness can exist without language if visual abstractions are present.

You could redefine language to include mental abstractions and maybe it wouldn't be so weird.

Language is a shared medium. Maybe an intelligence is capable of building abstractions in their head without the need for say, a symbol system to hopefully communicate with species similar to itself.

You may argue that the agent needs persistent memory. Well, so what? If the world has stable regularities from the perspective of the agent - if the sun rises every day, and language is associating certain visuals with certain thoughts (it's not when viewed in its original social definition - but conduct the thought experiment with sociality removed), who's to say that you can't form a kind of language around that?

Of course, this is all armchair, and I'm not trying to separate out what "real language" is or whatever, just thought experiments.

But the original poster has a good point though, that's been proven in papers, that the tokens an LLM spits out, themselves, attract them to certain distributions, and at least a decent amount of the tokens in CoT are there solely to bring itself to the right distribution.

Re: Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards

#63

Post by neovive » Tue, Jun 30, 2026, 2:56 PM UTC

> For an LLM, words are the source, and any meaning is just a byproduct that falls out by accident.

Recently, I've been thinking a lot about context and whether an LLM actually creates a true representation of a concept within its vectors. And for our current usage of LLMs, does it even matter? As models become so large, will the difference even be perceivable to us?

Re: Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards

#64

Post by thewebguyd » Tue, Jun 30, 2026, 2:56 PM UTC

micoti wrote: post #39

throwaway260124 wrote: post #27

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." And Islam the first verse was ‘read’ The first time I heard about emergent behavior in llms I thought about that. Maybe thought is too much because I don’t have anything coherent in mind but it feels so captivating like the premise of sci-fi story.

Word in the Bible is not meaning the actual word (like sematic array of characters) but more like greek word logos

Correct, in the Koine Greek, logos is the word that's actually used. Logos is a bit deeper than words, and is more akin to a universal principle of order that governs the cosmos.

"In the beginning was the logos" is like saying in the beginning were the laws of physics, and God is the laws of physics and the laws of physics are God.[1]

[1] This also entirely depends on which framework you are translating from. This would be accurate from the stoic interpretation of the logos but differs from a more mystical Johannine interpretation, in which the logos is outside the physical universe, not just operating within it. Logos is like the source code of the universe.

Re: Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards

#65

Post by devmor » Tue, Jun 30, 2026, 2:57 PM UTC

etrautmann wrote: post #15

michael1999 wrote: post #10

It is not all obvious that consciousness precedes language. Hellen Keller provides a vivid description of her pre-verbal mental state as something less than reflective conscious. > Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was a no-world. I cannot hope to describe adequately that unconscious, yet conscious time of nothingness. I did not know that I knew aught, or that I lived or…

I think this is different if you have vision though. I struggle to understand how someone can look at intelligent animals that don’t have language and not intuitively assume that they’re conscious. Yes this is a tricky problem without an answer but IMO the elements of consciousness can exist without language if visual abstractions are present.

Animals don’t have language the same way we do, but many of them do have some kind of semi-structured communication. Cats for example, when domesticated, develop an entirely parallel method of communication specifically to interact with humans - one that is neotenous in genesis, but nonetheless absent from their feral counterparts.

Re: Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards

#66

Post by vitamark » Tue, Jun 30, 2026, 2:57 PM UTC

estearum wrote: post #55

vitamark wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, language is not really required for thinking and conscious experiences, a huge chunk of people don't even have an internal monologue, and some (that'd be me) don't have any "byproducts" of thought process. Though there are recent experiments showing that unconscious brain retains language processing abilities [1], so the two might be as well independent systems [1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10…

IMO it's far more likely that people don't agree on what it means to "have an internal monologue" than that people actually bifurcate that dramatically on cognition. Surely there are some people with an actual difference from baseline, but I don't think it's the near-equal split that seems to appear when you just ask people about internal monologue This is in contrast with aphantasia (complete lack of mental imagery)…

Well, I can't say for the general population, but for me there's just nothing unless I actively try to think of words, sentences and other things. One moment you don't have an idea and the next you do, like a state switch.

I really feel like humans argue too much about how computer programs think and at the same time too little about how humans think. The topic is criminally underresearched and the existing research is all over the place.

Re: Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards

#67

Post by Autious » Tue, Jun 30, 2026, 2:57 PM UTC

Steve Jobs didn't invent the PC. It's reductionist and offensive to single him out and thanking him for that.

Computers didn't "figure out the maths". People did the math, the computers did the calculations.

Human knowledge is nowhere complete, it's silly to think so, and by extension it's silly to think the LLM's have anything near a complete knowledge set.

They don't even have access to all of current human knowledge, much less so future knowledge. A lot of text and information is locked away from the public internet and the internet altogether.

Not all types of useful ideas for applications have been invented, that's ridiculous, there are plenty of ideas that people haven't had yet. There are however a massive amount of shitty copies of the same shitty ideas.

Re: Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards

#68

Post by ohthehugemanate » Tue, Jun 30, 2026, 2:58 PM UTC

This person is just making stuff up that feels true to them. Caveat lector.

There are reams of grown up scientific research and philosophy on the relationship between language, thought, neurobiology, and inference. It's nice to hear how one person feels they think, but there is no weight to it if they don't know page one of the syllabus.

Re: Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards

#69

Post by csomar » Tue, Jun 30, 2026, 2:59 PM UTC

> When you speak, what comes first, the idea or the word? Do you first feel a thought inside you, and only after that go searching for the right word to wrap around it? I think we all do.

Most people don't actively think when they are talking or writing most of the time. Only during period of thinking that we do think. Most of the time, we just talk words. There is evidence is that we just observe ourselves talking and that the thinking itself is not conscious but it's still a theory.

> Now ask the same question about an LLM. For an LLM, it is exactly the opposite.

No one has any idea how an LLM come to correct words. LLMs produce numbers (tokens) that end up to coherent words.

> So what is an LLM, really? At its core, it is a big pile of words that predicts the next word, using some maths the computers figured out.

No, not really.

> The words are everything. For an LLM, words are the source, and any meaning is just a byproduct that falls out by accident.

The author provides no proof for this and there are very good reasons to think that LLMs have inherent thinking.

The rest of the article was just some random thoughts the OP jotted down? I just don't see their coherence to the beginning of the article.

Re: Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards

#70

Post by catlifeonmars » Tue, Jun 30, 2026, 2:59 PM UTC

pigeonwarz wrote: post #49

michael1999 wrote: post #10

It is not all obvious that consciousness precedes language. Hellen Keller provides a vivid description of her pre-verbal mental state as something less than reflective conscious. > Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was a no-world. I cannot hope to describe adequately that unconscious, yet conscious time of nothingness. I did not know that I knew aught, or that I lived or…

It is likely that language forms a sort of quanta of reasoning. It is far easier to posit a verbal hypothesis pertaining to verbal subjects and test it than to try and do it nonverbally. Maths is probably a great example of this. Try and describe Pythagoras' Theorem without using maths notation or words. Difficult, right? Reasoning is a House of Cards, and without understanding what the card is that exercise becomes…

a^2 + b^2 = c^2 is perhaps a poor example, since there are several visual proofs that don’t rely on language. I don’t think this negates your overall point fwiw.