Lately, there's been much talk about what LLMs do as being in some sense inauthentic. I'm not going to talk about consciousness here. It's not a concept that I think has the right substance to be useful for my purposes. But I take issue with the stance some people seem to have that LLMs' writing is, as Byrne Hobart calls it, "fanfiction". (Usual caveat that I am a huge fan of Byrne, you should read the Diff, etc.)

It's true that when an LLM writes something, it's writing as if it experienced reality like you do, but it does not. It is often making presumptions about the nature of reality that feel a bit cringe. But that's what you do too. There isn't a sense in which you've experienced other people's lives. There's only a sense in which there's a partial isomorphism that you see through a glass darkly and then try to connect with people about.

And so I would like you to consider that when an LLM writes something, it's writing something in the same way that you would write something about the experience of being dead. Death is of course a fascination of many humans, and we've all witnessed deaths. There are many records of death, of strange events around death, the Bible being a very famous one. But I haven't met anyone who claims to have died. There are people who claim to have truly died, in what are often labeled 'near death experience' and these are subject of some incredible media, e.g., The OA.

The OA is probably the only piece of media I've ever seen deal with the concept of faith in terms of an interesting actual take on social dynamics. One way to view it is what if miracles were real, but they were a very weak and rare effect, how would you interact with them?

For most of us, such questions are fanfiction, but they're fanfiction that allows us to grapple with a reality we don't dare chase immediately.

If you experience something and you think it's death, I personally think you should be suspicious that it was truly death. And if you agree with my skepticism, then when we write about death, we're writing about something that we see affect the universe, but that we never touch. You are like LLMs when you think about death. I think that's one of the reasons Memento Mori hits so hard. It's not just that it's the end of everything. It's that it's not something that you can understand: why you're here. But that fact doesn't mean we don't have very serious, complex, and fascinating theories of death. And it certainly doesn't mean that writing about death is fanfiction. It's writing as a tool to grapple with a reality you can't have full acquaintance with. But that is what all thinking is, and most of communicating too.

You are like LLMs when you think of death.